The Semantic Web and human inference: A lesson from cognitive science

Abstract

For the development of Semantic Web technology, researchers and developers in the Semantic Web community need to focus on the areas in which human reasoning is particularly difficult. Two studies in this paper demonstrate that people are predisposed to use class-inclusion labels for inductive judgments. This tendency appears to stem from a general characteristic of human reasoning - using heuristics to solve problems. The inference engines and interface designs that incorporate human reasoning need to integrate this general characteristic underlying human induction. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.