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Plenary Lecture

Structuring an Ontological Knowledge Base for Biomass Exploitation and Biofuels Production

Professor Fragiskos A. Batzias
Laboratory of Simulation of Industrial Processes
Department of Industrial Management and Technology
University of Piraeus
Greece
E-mail: fbatzi@unipi.gr

Abstract: In information science, an ‘ontology’ represents the knowledge acquired/processed within a domain in terms of concepts and functional/logical/causal relations between them, expressed explicitly by means of a controlled vocabulary, mutually agreed/shared and continually enriched by the human experts who are in charge for the corresponding activities. The present work deals with structuring a Knowledge Base (KB) under the form of an ontology for biomass exploitation with emphasis on biofuels production. An inference engine has been developed in order to search this KB effectively, serving also as an intelligent agent capable to discover new relations and restructure entities to achieve better functionality of the system and connectivity between the nodes of the corresponding cognitive network, while executing technical work like ‘thinning’ and ‘thickening’, thus creating relatively independent sub-structures and super-structures, respectively. Multi-criteria taxonomic functions are also used to categorize (through usual operators like ‘is-a’ or ‘is-member-of’) lignocellulosic species while partonomic or mereological functions perform decomposition/recomposition by means of logical operators, like ‘is-part-of’ or ‘connects-A-to-B’. The methodology developed and presented herein suggests a combination of two ontologies, one for the biomass and another for the biofuels produced by downstream industrial processes. The corresponding inference engine is capable for searching in both domains, bridging the respective knowledge, thus contributing to total optimization in terms of Environmental Life Cycle Analysis.

Brief Biography of the Speaker: Prof. Fragiskos Batzias holds a 5years Diploma and a PhD degree in Chemical Engineering, and a BSc in Economics. He has also studied Mathematics and Philosophy. He is Director of the Laboratory of Simulation of Industrial Processes and Head of the Research Group on Systems Analysis at the Department of Industrial Management and Technology of the University of Piraeus, Greece. He is teaching at the interdepartmental postgraduate courses (i) Systems of Energy Management and Protection of the Environment, running by the University of Piraeus in cooperation with the Chem. Eng. Dept. of the Nat. Tech. Univ. of Athens, and (ii) Techno-Economic Systems, running by the Electr. & Comp. Eng. Dept. of the Nat. Tech. Univ. of Athens in cooperation with the University of Athens and the University of Piraeus. His research interests are in chemical engineering systems analysis and knowledge based decision making. He has >100 publications in highly ranked journals and conference proceedings, including 29 research monographs in collective volumes, with 171 citations and an h-index of 8 (for the period 2004-2012, source: ISI Web of Science, Thompson Scientific; self-citations have been excluded).
He has participated (and chaired after invitation from the organizers) in prestigious international conferences, such as those organized periodically by the IEEE, the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE), the DECHEMA, CHISA, WSEAS Organizations. He organizes the annual Symposium on Industrial and Environmental Case Studies running successfully since 2004 within the International Conference of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering (ICCMSE).

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