16th Belgian-Dutch Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC2004)
http://www.ai.rug.nl/conf/bnaic2004/
21-22 October 2004 Groningen

authors: Joost, Jacco

Overall impression

In general I found it an interesting experience, "gezellig" (cosy
informal) might even be an appropriate term. There were a lot of
familiar faces such as SEN representatives from CWI, a number of SIKS
students, the semanticweb crowd from VU and some people I went to
university with. The 'big guys' (frank, guus, bob etc) however were
absent. The quality and the contents of the talk I found pretty
good. This was mostly due to the fact that they allow already accepted
papers for other conferences to be presented. This way you get a
reasonable view of what is happening in other disciplines in AI. To
conclude I think it will be good to show our face here one and a
while and moreover a completely VU dominated semantic web track simply
has to change.

talks:

Semantic Web track

C-OWL: contextualizing ontologies
This talk was presented at the iswc2004 in Florida. It talks about the
difference between an ontology (=shared understanding of a domain)
and a context (=model of a domain from 1 party). C-OWL is an extension
of OWL which allows ontologies and context to live together.

Foundations for Service Ontologies: Aligning OWL-S to DOLCE
This talk was presented at WWW2004 and talked about the lack of
semantics in OWL-S (ontology to describe web services). The authors
tried to solve this by using an existing upper-ontology DOLCE to fill
the semantic holes. They found this was a time intensive process due
to incompatibility problems with the ontologies and the difficulty of
really understanding the semantics of concepts in the upper layers of
the ontology which are typically quite abstract.

Methods for Porting Resources to the Semantic Web.  This talk will be
presented at iswc2005 and talked about a methodology for converting
existing thesauri to the semantic web.

Logic track

Dialectical Argumentation with Argumentation Schemes: an approach to
Legal Logic.  This talk was about the "logical" reasoning in law cases
which typically is less strict then in traditional logic. For example
A saw that B murdered C -> B is guilty. However if you also know that A
is unreliable then you cannot make this inference, unless there is
evidence that A was reliable etc. The author presented a system which
used argumentation schemes which can be used to analyze legal
statements.