Allan Third

Marc Eisenstadt, Manoharan Ramachandran, Niaz Chowdhury et al.

Goal: As the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2019/2020 unfolds, a COVID-19 'Immunity Passport' has been mooted as a way to enable individuals to return back to work. While the quality of antibody testing, the availability of vaccines, and the likelihood of even attaining COVID-19 immunity continue to be researched, we address the issues involved in providing tamper-proof and privacy-preserving certification for test results and vaccinations. Methods: We developed a prototype mobile phone app and requisite decentralized server architecture that facilitates instant verification of tamper-proof test results. Personally identifiable information is only stored at the user's discretion, and the app allows the end-user selectively to present only the specific test result with no other personal information revealed. The architecture, designed for scalability, relies upon (a) the 2019 World Wide Web Consortium standard called 'Verifiable Credentials', (b) Tim Berners-Lee's decentralized personal data platform 'Solid', and (c) a Consortium Ethereum-based blockchain. Results: Our mobile phone app and decentralized server architecture enable the mixture of verifiability and privacy in a manner derived from public/private key pairs and digital signatures, generalized to avoid restrictive ownership of sensitive digital keys and/or data. Benchmark performance tests show it to scale linearly in the worst case, as significant processing is done locally on each app. For the test certificate Holder, Issuer (e.g. healthcare staff, pharmacy) and Verifier (e.g. employer), it is 'just another app' which takes only minutes to use. Conclusions: The app and decentralized server architecture offer a prototype proof of concept that is readily scalable, applicable generically, and in effect 'waiting in the wings' for the biological issues, plus key ethical issues raised in the discussion section, to be resolved.

Pasquale Iero, Allan Third, Paul Piwek

This paper describes a formalism that subsumes Peterson's intermediate quantifier syllogistic system, and extends the ideas by van Eijck on Aristotle's logic. Syllogisms are expressed in a concise form making use of and extending the Monotonicity Calculus. Contradictory and contrary relationships are added so that deduction can derive propositions expressing a form of negation.

Sandra Williams, Richard Power, Allan Third

Recent developments in controlled natural language editors for knowledge engineering (KE) have given rise to expectations that they will make KE tasks more accessible and perhaps even enable non-engineers to build knowledge bases. This exploratory research focussed on novices and experts in knowledge engineering during their attempts to learn a controlled natural language (CNL) known as OWL Simplified English and use it to build a small knowledge base. Participants' behaviours during the task were observed through eye-tracking and screen recordings. This was an attempt at a more ambitious user study than in previous research because we used a naturally occurring text as the source of domain knowledge, and left them without guidance on which information to select, or how to encode it. We have identified a number of skills (competencies) required for this difficult task and key problems that authors face.