OntoScene, A Logic-based Scene Interpreter: Implementation and Application in the Rock Art Domain
This work addresses scene interpretation for domain experts in fields like archaeology, but it is incremental as it builds on existing logic-based methods.
The authors tackled the problem of understanding visual scene semantics by developing OntoScene, a logic-based framework that uses ontologies and Prolog rules to interpret scenes based on element semantics and spatial relations, applied to prehistoric rock art as a testbed.
We present OntoScene, a framework aimed at understanding the semantics of visual scenes starting from the semantics of their elements and the spatial relations holding between them. OntoScene exploits ontologies for representing knowledge and Prolog for specifying the interpretation rules that domain experts may adopt, and for implementing the SceneInterpreter engine. Ontologies allow the designer to formalize the domain in a reusable way, and make the system modular and interoperable with existing multiagent systems, while Prolog provides a solid basis to define complex rules of interpretation in a way that can be affordable even for people with no background in Computational Logics. The domain selected for experimenting OntoScene is that of prehistoric rock art, which provides us with a fascinating and challenging testbed. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)