Making Software Agents Smarter Tim Finin University of Maryland, Baltimore County ICAART 2010, 22 January

Motivation The web has made people smarter and more capable

Motivation It provides easy access to most of the world's knowledge and services

Motivation Web standards, protocols & technology work better than earlier distributed infor- mation system technologies

But what about our agents? tell register Agents still have a very minimal under- standing of text, images and video

MotivationSwoogle Swoogle Swoogle Swoogle Swoogle Swoogle Swoogle Swoogle SwoogleSwoogle Swoogle Swoogle Swoogle Swoogle Swoogle tell register Software agents need better access to a Web of knowledge to amplify their intelligence and knowledge

MotivationDBpedia DBpedia DBpedia DBpedia DBpedia DBpedia DBpedia DBpedia DBpediaDBpedia DBpedia DBpedia DBpedia DBpedia DBpedia tell register Key technologies: Semantic Web, linked data, text information extraction, Wikipedia derived KBs, etc.

ACLs Agents and knowledge has been a focus of agent communication languages (ACLs) Much of the ACL work has focused on primitives, protocols and infrastructure Less attention has been applied to finding, sharing and integrating ontologies, common background data, and populating KBs from the Web

Linked data and Wikipedia Wikipedia as a source of knowledge –Wikis are an effective tool for building know- ledge resources: consensus driven, dynamic, high quality and free Wikipedia as an ontology –Every Wikipedia page is a concept or object Wikipedia as RDF data –Map this ontology into RDF DBpedia as the lynchpin for Linked Data –Exploit its breadth of coverage to integrate information

Linked Data on the Web, 3/09 ~5 billion integrated facts published on the Web as RDF Linked Data

Wikipedia is the new Cyc There’s a history of using ency- clopedias to develop KBs Cyc’s original goal (c. 1984) was to encode the knowledge in a desktop encyclopedia And use it as an integrating ontology Wikipedia is comparable to Cyc’s original desktop encyclopedia But it’s machine accessible and malleable

Populating Freebase KB

Underlying Powerset’s KB

Driving AskWiki’s answers

With sometimes surprising results

Mined by TrueKnowledge

Source of Faviki tags

Conclusion, for now The web has made people smarter and more capable, providing easy access to the world's knowledge and services Software agents need better access to a Web of knowledge to amplify whatever intelligence they have Some key technologies are ready to exploit: Semantic Web, linked data, DBpedia, Wikitology, etc.