DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED INFORMATICS

The Semantic Systems (SEMSYS) research group works on methodological foundations and specific application fields of semantic systems,  for instance in the areas of Multi-Agent Systems, Ontologies and Thesauri, Semantic Machine Learning, Semantic Natural Language Processing and the Semantic Web. Semantics is the key to Explainable Artificial Intelligence, where systems do not only provide answers, but can also explain why these answers were given.

The specific focus of our work is on declarative formalisms, a term which encompasses declarative languages for knowledge representation and reasoning and declarative systems for automatically drawing conclusions. Declarative is used in contrast to imperative, which most programming languages are based on: imperative code specifies how to compute output, whereas declarative code specifies what the output should be. The declarative languages considered by us are rooted in logic, and many are of the logic programming variety, most notably Answer Set Programming.