IRIT collective project
Platform for Research and Experiments
in the Treatment of Information

proposed by

Henri Prade    Florence Sèdes

The project: To have a sufficiently generic reference application in order to demonstrate advanced researches developed at IRIT in the information processing and artificial intelligence areas, and to experiment new ideas. More specifically PRETI intends to:

• illustrate research works developed at IRIT and to emphasize their potentiels,
• gather application oriented works of various research groups, to have them implemented jointly in order to see how these functionalities could interest and benefit from each other,
• be in the long term a sufficiently rich repository in order to contribute to renew the way of posing problems from the methodological point of view as well as from the application point of view.

What this project is not: neither "one more benchmark", nor "a place for straightforward technology transfer ". Indeed, this project is not related to any precise contract, in order to remain free of any specification, which woud be far too specific.

The project takes its framework in the area of intelligent interactive information management, in a decision-making perspective accessible to not chosen specialist users.

The chosen application refers to general problems of tourism and culture in the Midi-Pyrenees (to seek information, to plan a journey, to organize a travel, possibly also to study the tourist's tastes, etc). Tourism is a field of applications which makes possible to provide easily understandable illustrations for a broad range of problems and methods.

The platform PRETI is accessible by internet with a restrict access to intranet. First of all, fuzzy set-based functionalities:

• instance-based prediction,
• flexible query allowing to express users' preferences,
• flexible querying with argued answers ,
• query by example,
• discovering default rules,
• learning different kinds of fuzzy rules from fuzzy data,
• knowledge extraction from texts,
• flexible query and semi-structured data

have been integrated in the platform PRETI in order to exploit a database describing FICTITIOUS "housings" (lodgings) which queries the user.

Some other functionalities are under consideration:

• making sense of a sequence of events,
• remodelling geographic data to facilitate the interrogation by sketch,
• request adaptation to the user for querying semi-structured documents,
• learning Sugeno integrals,
• imprecise regression,
• fuzzy logic approach to topic extraction in texts , ...

The development scenario is about a process of consultation targeted in a tourisco-cultural context. The project must be extended to other functionalities and probably integrate other databases/media. Consequently, a longer task consists listing functionalities, available at IRIT, likely to found a place in the project and thus to be presented under a scenario which can take place in the PRETI environment.

Here some possible ideas of which one can think and which remain to be refined. For example, from the user's preferences as regards monuments, hotels, restaurants, concerts(?), etc:

• seek for interesting sites,
• organize, while taking into account constraints, a one day schedule satisfying most of the identified goals,
• organize a travelling over several days,
• seek for documents (images or sounds) relating to interests specified by taking into account the descriptors provided by indexing,
• seek for documents including both (indexed) images and textual comments (monuments, sites, paintings...) with the assistance of information search tools.

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Last modification the 11/24/2009