Colloquium Cognitive Systems

How to Agree to Disagree: Managing Multiple Perspectives using Standpoint Logic

Prof. Dr. Sebastian Rudolph (TU Dresden)

Abstract:
The importance of taking individual, potentially conflicting perspectives into account when dealing with knowledge has been widely recognised. Many existing ontology management approaches fully merge knowledge perspectives, which may require weakening in order to maintain consistency; others represent the distinct views in an entirely detached way. This talk presents an alternative, referred to as Standpoint Logic, a simple, yet versatile multi-modal logic “add-on” for existing KR languages intended for the integrated representation of domain knowledge relative to diverse standpoints, which can be hierarchically organised, combined, and put in relation with each other. 
My talk will introduce the general logical framework of Standpoint Logic and discuss variations which differ in expressivity and computational complexity of automated reasoning.
About:
Sebastian Rudolph is full professor for computational logic and head of the AI Institute at TU Dresden and principal investigator at the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Dresden/Leipzig. His scientific interests revolve around artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on logical formalisms and methods for knowledge representation and reasoning, ranging from theoretical foundations (such as semantic and computational properties) to practical deployment (including ontological modeling and interactive knowledge acquisition). In the course of a recently finalized ERC Consolidator Grant, his team investigated general principles of decidability in logic-based knowledge representation.