Logical Information Systems and their Extension to the Semantic Web

Logical Information Systems (LIS) are a paradigm of information systems that rely on logics to represent and reason about information, and on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to tightly combine querying and navigation. Users are guided in the formulation of complex logical queries through a navigation structure that is automatically generated from data. Hence, no a priori knowledge of the data and the query language is necessary to explore a dataset.

LIS have recently been extended to explore complex graphs of objects, rather than collections of objects only: e.g., a genealogy of people. This extension is based on the standard knowledge representation formalisms of the Semantic Web, which makes LIS applicable to the growing amount of semantic data. The navigation structure is formalized, and proved to satisfy important properties: safeness (no dead-end), and completeness w.r.t. an expressive query language.

In this presentation, LIS are demonstrated with a generic software, Camelis, and illustrated on a real collection of photos.