Towards an ontology for automatic scienti c discovery ?

Abstract

While some attempts have been made to automate the scienti c discovery process in speci c domains, these approaches have limited support for formal representation and reasoning about observations and phenomena. This research aims to create a generic formal ontology to support an intelligent agent for observation induced knowledge discovery.

Keywords

• Agents ontologies Automatic Hypothesis Generation

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T. Wanyana and D. Moodley

A Hypothesis Ontology; Core Requirements: Hypotheses and their semantic meaning have to be consistently and precisely represented to aid reusability and reproducibility [ 1 ]. We suggest that the following top level elements as the core requirements for the representation: 1) The Hypothesis statement: an assertion of the explanation of the underlying causal mechanism of the phenomenon. 2) The hypothesis Quali er: the probability value that represents the agent's belief of the extent to which the hypothesis explains the observed phenomenon. 3) Triggering Phenomenon: the phenomenon for which the hypothesis was generated. 4) The Provenance Record: This consists of the phenomenon detection mechanism, the quali er threshold used in hypothesis selection and the hypothesis appraisal mechanism used in selecting the most plausible hypotheses. 5)Unsuccessful Hypotheses: These are the competing alternatives that are unsuccessful. Table 1 shows some of the required elements and which hypothesis representation ontology has catered for them.

Conclusion: In conclusion, we have presented some of the core elements towards a generic formal ontology for automatically generating hypotheses to explain new phenomena in some environment.

Towards an ontology for automatic scienti c discovery

References

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