Research Areas

With natural language dialogue, along with many other applications in science and technology, formal semantic modelling by formal ontologies is relevant for highly complex, heterogeneous systems, where data ("knowledge") of very different kind and sources needs to be combined semantically and reliably. Application areas include interoperability in e-science, or active formal documents.

Semantic modelling is the basis for a new form of change management, which guarantees the persistence of reuse of documents, designs and products.

Moreover, we are developing concrete tool support such as the document format OMDoc, the heterogeneous toolset Hets, and the SyCe development environment for hardware/sofware codesign.

Projects in this area.

Incompatibilities, ambiguities and critical situations can be analysed automatically by formal modelling, and can be avoided by explanatory dialogues. The more adapted and accustomed system and user become to each other, the more reliable their interaction- this is what we call "cognitively adequate interaction".

A particular application area are assistance systems for the elderly or handicapped (e.g. intelligent wheel chairs like the Bremen semi-autonomous wheelchair Rolland), which help compensate for loss or reduction of cognitive abilities; these need to be analysed and modelled to allow for an adaptivitiy of the system and increase usability and user acceptance.

Projects in this area