CAISOR Research Agenda

Welcome to the CAISOR Website

CAISOR is a Combined Agenda for Information Analysis, Software Systems, Open-Access Publishing and Knowledge Representation. It stands for a line of research that uses and promotes a particular paradigm with respect to software systems, knowledge representation and related topics.

Basic Tenets and their Realization

The basic tenets of the paradigm used in CAISOR are described concisely under the CAISOR Paradigm tab in the left-side menu.

Historical Background

The CAISOR line of research started actually around 1970 (with other names), but it is no less active today. Several of its main ideas were arguably ahead of their time in those earlier years, while they are well in line with contemporary research directions. Please see the CAISOR Archive for further details.

Current Research Activities and Publications

An overview of our current research activities is found under the CAISOR Agenda tab in the left-side menu. Further information about these activities, including their recent publications is found under the tabs following it in the menu.

Historical, Courseware and Working Materials

The following composite webpages describe other aspects of our research approach:

• The CAISOR Courseware webpage contains lecture notes, viewgraphs, and other teaching and learning materials for university courses in Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, and associated Software Techniques.
• The CAISOR Archive contains archived copies of our research articles and reports, as well as descriptions of projects in this line of research during earlier years.
• The CAISOR Workspace contains software, datasets and project notes for use in current research activities as well as in university courses.
• The CAISOR Hyperbook is an evolving structure that is intended to become an integrated presentation of research results from the CAISOR line of research. It is not yet a finished text; the goal is that it shall be complete by year 2015.

Software and Infoware

Besides research publications, the main output of this research consists of computer software and infoware, for example fact bases and knowledge bases with reliable contents. Software results are described in the Courseware and Workspace divisions listed above. The following are the main infoware results.

• The Common Knowledge Library (CKL) is an open-access fact and knowledge base that is organized in a modular fashion, and with a systematic approach to validation of these modules, including but not restricted to type checking.
• The Journal Information Resource (JIR) (in development) will be a peer-to-peer service for case-by-case information about the conditions whereby scientific publishers will allow parallell publication by the institutional archive of one of the authors.

Research Methodology and Infrastructure

In addition to the research topics addressed above, we also address the following issues which have both methodological and technical aspects:

• Methodology of research, in particular for explorative systems-building research in computing sciences. Our thoughts on this topic are presented in the composite webpage MORADOR. We try to use the methods described there in our own research. In particular, the CAISOR Workspace structure mentioned above is organized in order to support a MORADOR methodology.
• The Experimental Electronic Press (XPEP) is our "publisher" for both articles and webpages. This is an important part of our line or research due to the strong relationship between research methodology and research publication style.
• Publication Style. The composite webpage on the CAISOR Publication Style describes and discusses the rationale for the particular publication style that we use for CAISOR-related documents, ranging from articles and technical reports to composite webpages like the present one.