The not so simple ontology of a "primitive" robot

Abstract

The paper addresses the important issue of (enhancing) robotic intelligence and enhancing the robots' communication with humans, intelligent agents, sensors and machines. First, it proposes a way to achieve communication in natural language for the agents in hybrid groups with the help of the Ontological Semantic Technology (OST), currently the only approach to accessing deep and comprehensive meaning of language and other data, thus turning it into information, but in principle, one of potentially numerous competing proposals that may ultimately eclipse this early bird. The main thrust of the paper and, I believe, the main reason my colleagues are not ready (yet) to jump into my boat, as it were, is in the second, much more tentative and controversial part of the paper which is philosophical, at least in part. It is attempting to build up a theoretical foundation for a close look at the world of a "primitive" robot and argues that its ontology is not so primitive at all, and it is the theoretical foundation which brings it all to the surface in a pretty straightforward fashion. Contrary to what it may sound, that does not make the OST or any other rich-ontology-based approach to robotic intelligence and communication any more complicated-on the contrary, it reduces it to the well-traveled and -tested situation of domain expansion, a standard feasible procedure, increasingly automated but still including a limited and highly constrained/templated participation by a native speaker. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.