Posted: 24th October 2017

Professor Boris Motik has been awarded a three-year fellowship extension by EPSRC for his work on intelligent information systems. The extension will build on his EPSRC early career fellowship, ‘MaSI3: A Massively Scalable Intelligent Information Infrastructure’, which resulted in the team developing techniques that are now used by two startups.

Intelligent data management techniques play a key role in many areas. For example, oil producers such as StatOil analyse streaming sensor data to diagnose faults and prevent failures. To simplify the management of the data, intelligent information systems provide services that capture background knowledge about the application domain, and infer information implicit in the data and the background knowledge.

The objective of MaSI3 was to make intelligent information systems a reality by developing scalable reasoning and query answering techniques. These underpinned a new intelligent information system called RDFox, which recently provided the technological foundation for two startups: Covatic and Oxford Semantic Technologies.

Boris’s extension project, ‘AnaLOG: Datalog Extensions for the Analysis of Static and Streaming Data’ will develop research in this area, focusing on the key data analysis problem to design a language that can express the relevant tasks. Datalog has been identified as a natural starting point but has some shortcomings. The objective of AnaLOG is therefore to develop Datalog extensions for data analysis in intelligent information systems, establish links with known problem solving methods, and evaluate the results in practice.