Increasing the circularity of resource use in our society has been recognized as a path to sustainability, i.e., transitioning into a more circular economy. There are many different circular strategies to do so, such as reusing products and components, refurbishing and remanufacturing used products, or recycling left-over or used materials. To enable these strategies, it is necessary to share information at the infrastructure level and to communicate between industry sectors along the product life cycle. Enabling semantic interoperability in this information sharing and communication is therefore a key to increasing circularity. However, knowledge representation for the circular economy (CE) domain, which involves many relevant industry sectors related to product life cycles, remains challenging. To bridge this gap, we developed the Circular Economy Ontology Network (CEON) within the Onto-DESIDE project. This ontology network aims to fill gaps in CE by defining cross-sectorial concepts and to enable semantics-aware data documentation. We demonstrate CEON through cross-industry data documentation scenarios spanning construction, electronics, and textile sectors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02253
Early detection of at-risk students and timely academic intervention pose major challenges in advanced mathematics education, where complex conceptual hierarchies and nonlinear learning trajectories often hold back students' academic performance. This study adopts multimodal data analytics to build a dynamic framework for learning behavior prediction and academic early warning. It constructs a hierarchical knowledge graph ontology, realizes adaptive edge weighting according to problem difficulty and student performance, and combines heterogeneous graph attention with temporal sequence modeling to capture students' evolving knowledge states. Empirical tests on semester-long multimodal datasets prove that this method can accurately identify high-risk students and effectively track error propagation. Targeted interventions greatly improve students' knowledge mastery and reduce academic risks. The results verify that integrating knowledge graph analytics with multimodal temporal modeling can deliver more efficient and personalized learning support for advanced mathematics education.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01224
Ontology learning transforms unstructured text into structured representations for automated reasoning. Yet structuring information risks losing it, and current evaluation methodologies cannot detect such loss, focusing on structural correctness while failing to measure whether meaning survives transformation. We propose an evaluation methodology that addresses this: comparing LLM task performance on source documents against performance on transformed representations, with the difference quantifying semantic loss. We demonstrate this approach on legal merger agreement analysis, a domain chosen for its complex language and precise semantic requirements, comparing direct LLM application against three ontology learning methods across six language models. The results reveal systematic semantic loss with significant variation based on reasoning complexity and model-method interactions. Our contributions are: (1) an evaluation framework for measuring semantic preservation in ontology learning, and (2) empirical evidence that semantic loss varies dramatically with model-method pairing, providing guidance for selecting optimal configurations in legal knowledge systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12326
Capturing dynamic malware behavior in a practical but still semantically precise manner remains a significant challenge in cyber threat intelligence. While standards such as MAEC and STIX provide widely adopted vocabularies for describing malware artifacts and observations, they represent data with considerable complexity in structures that often obscure important ontological distinctions. In particular, they tend to conflate enduring malware artifacts with the events generated during execution, thereby flattening distinctions that are central in foundational standards for ontology design. In this paper, we conduct a foundational ontological analysis of core MAEC and STIX constructs relevant to dynamic malware analysis relying on Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) as a theoretical lens. Our analysis reveals some ontological mismatches arising from the conflation of artifacts, dispositions, and runtime events in MAEC and STIX that complicate coherent representation of dynamic malware behavior and, from a practical perspective, limit the ability to reason about execution traces. Based on these insights, we propose MAECO-Lite, a lightweight ontology designed to represent data and operationalize their processing for dynamic malware analysis. The ontology adopts a modular structure centered on samples, processes, actions, system artifacts, and MITRE ATT&CK Techniques, while maintaining a clear separation between enduring entities and runtime events. An initial evaluation using description logic concept learning algorithms shows that the simplified ontology significantly improves learning performance, demonstrating that ontologically grounded modelling can enhance both semantic clarity and computational usability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31199
User Experience Research (UXR) Points of View (POVs) distil complex and often fragmented research evidence into actionable perspectives that guide how teams interpret user needs, frame design decisions, and align stakeholders. Although POVs are widely used in industry practice, there are few published examples that explicitly document how POVs are constructed, particularly in culturally sensitive and low-resource contexts. This paper presents an exemplar case study demonstrating how a culturally grounded, AI-augmented UXR POV was developed to inform TeleDeCa, a telemedicine dementia care framework for family caregivers in Nigeria. Building on the UXR POV Playbook and pyramid framework, we illustrate how mixed-methods research, hypothesis generation, and ontology-based modelling can be combined to form a defensible POV without requiring a fully finalised system or validated outcomes. Generative AI (GenAI) is integrated across the UXR POV framework as a bounded research collaborator, supporting synthesis, hypothesis exploration, and narrative construction while preserving human judgment, ethical accountability, and cultural sensitivity. The contribution of this paper lies in the extraction of reusable Play Cards and a Play that extend the UXR POV Playbook and serve as exemplar material for the CHI 2026 workshop on developing AI-powered UXR POVs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31147
MCP Server Proto-OKN (mcp-proto-okn) is a Python-based Model Context Protocol server that enables AI assistants to discover, inspect, query and integrate scientific knowledge graphs through natural language. The server provides graph routing, schema inspection, SPARQL execution, ontology expansion, multi-graph querying, and transcript generation, lowering the barrier to cross-domain knowledge graph analysis for biomedical and scientific users. mcp-proto-okn is implemented in Python using the FastMCP framework and is available at this https URL. Documentation, client configuration instructions, and example analysis transcripts are provided in the GitHub repository.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30283
We present a protocol to evaluate ChatGPT's ability to generate disease-centric biomedical associations. It outlines how we generate the associations, validate the biological entities using biomedical ontologies, and verify associations using literature. The protocol includes a self-consistency strategy to assess generative reliability across ChatGPT models. To address ontology exact-match limitations, we provide a use case performing semantic verification through a workflow enabled by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) powered by open-source large language models (LLMs). This enables LLMs to establish truth over content generated by other LLMs and expose hallucination.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30400
Multi-step robot manipulation requires acting under uncertainty about how the scene will evolve, making exploration and policy adaptation challenging. We study whether short-horizon, task-consistent future videos can provide useful structured priors for control and reinforcement-learning fine-tuning. We formalize this idea through Future-Experience Conditioning (FEC), a simple interface that conditions closed-loop policies on a latent representation of a short future video. In our simulation setup, future clips are generated in three stages, an LLM reasoner operating over a task ontology initialized from the current scene state, a robot-free digital-twin rollout of the intended object motion, and a mask-free video diffusion model that synthesizes a robot-consistent future clip without requiring segmentation at inference. We instantiate this future-conditioning interface primarily with BC and BC+RL, and compare against a future-conditioned Streaming Flow Policy (SFP) baseline on RoboCasa and CALVIN under NoFuture, GTFuture, GenFuture, and WrongFuture. Generated futures improve performance over no-future conditioning, while mismatched futures degrade it, and our BC+RL instantiation achieves the strongest overall results. An average BC+RL learning-curve analysis across 8 CALVIN tasks further shows that GTFuture improves fastest, GenFuture improves earlier and to a higher level than NoFuture, and WrongFuture remains at zero throughout training. These results suggest that short-horizon future videos can serve as useful structured priors for exploration and policy adaptation under imperfect future predictions. this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29864
Collaborations with Generative AI often begin with a short prompt and end with an opaque output, leaving implicit who was involved, what task was being pursued, which resources were used, and which constraints should have shaped the process. This limited contextual explicitness hinders trust, traceability, and accountability, particularly when Generative AI is embedded in information-intensive workflows such as search, querying, and profile management. This paper introduces From Prompts to Context, an ontology-driven framework for representing Human-Generative AI collaboration. Its core component, the Contextual Collaboration AI Ontology (CCAI), models key elements of collaboration - including tasks, agent roles, resources, and constraints - as a shared machine-interpretable vocabulary. By combining populated CCAI instances with SPARQL-based context retrieval in operational workflows, the framework turns otherwise ephemeral prompt-response interactions into structured and queryable collaboration traces linking prompts, outputs, and their surrounding context. The approach is illustrated through a case study involving a software development team building a competency-based education feature for viewing and updating learner competency profiles. The case study shows how the framework can support the representation and documentation of collaboration episodes across requirements analysis, design, implementation, and testing. Within this setting, the results indicate that explicit collaboration modelling helps make task context more explicit, improves the traceability of AI-generated contributions, and supports more transparent and accountable Human-Generative AI practices. We conclude by outlining design principles for future Human-Generative AI systems that emphasise not only output quality, but also the explicit representation of the collaborative context in which outputs are produced.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29675
Question answering (QA) is a core challenge in AI, particularly for complex queries requiring multi-hop reasoning across documents, or symbolic operations like aggregation or exhaustive listing. Retrieval-augmented generation has become the dominant approach to QA, with recent graph-based variants addressing part of these issues by organizing knowledge to better support compositional questions. However, most textual graph-based RAG methods still lack the structure needed for symbolic operations useful to answer complex questions reliably. This motivates symbolic graph-based approaches, which extract knowledge graphs (KGs) whose relations are logic predicates that enable SQL-like querying. Yet these pipelines typically use LLMs for KG extraction, which can introduce consistency issues, where extracted facts may violate commonsense ontology constraints. We propose a neuro-symbolic framework for ontology-grounded KG construction combining open-domain extraction, embedding-based canonicalization of types and predicates, and targeted LLM-based correction of ontology violations. By deferring corrections to a post-extraction stage, our method avoids repeated LLM calls, substantially reducing token usage while improving KG consistency and preserving downstream QA quality. Finally, we show that the extracted KGs are well suited for symbolic querying by measuring the occurrence of SPARQL graph patterns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29168
Linking free-text phenotype descriptions to ontology terms, typically referred to as phenotype annotation, is essential for the cross-study integration of comparative morphological data. This labor intensive process has heavily relied on highly trained human experts, which makes it challenging to scale and thus a key bottleneck. Dahdul et al. (2018) established a Gold Standard (GS) of Entity-Quality (EQ) annotations across seven phylogenetic studies and used it to evaluate three human curators and the Semantic CharaParser NLP tool with ontology-based semantic similarity metrics; they reported that machine-human consistency was significantly lower than inter-curator (human-human) consistency. Here we revisit that benchmark with five frontier hosted LLMs from Anthropic and OpenAI, each operating as an "agentic curator" within a self-contained workspace that supplies the source publication PDF, the same annotation guide used by the original human curators, the four project ontologies (UBERON, PATO, BSPO, GO), and a validation script. Evaluated against the same Gold Standard, every agent fell within the range of inter-curator variability of the three trained human biocurators of the original study; the best performing agents approached but did not reach the best performing human curator. Agents substantially outperformed Semantic CharaParser on all four metrics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28965
This paper proposes ontology-guided reasoning for affordance-based explanations of robot navigation. In human environments, it is not sufficient for a robot to detect that its route is blocked. It must also reason about what nearby objects afford, which state changes are possible, and which of these changes would allow it to continue safely. We address this problem by representing nearby entities, their affordances, affordance states, and qualitative spatial relations in a local affordance ontology and by evaluating hypothetical object--affordance state changes as candidate explanation factors. This yields explanations that are not only semantically grounded but also actionable. We instantiate the approach in a lightweight benchmark centered on a robot librarian scenario and evaluate it on procedurally generated navigation cases. The results show that ontology-guided reasoning identifies relevant explanation factors more accurately than a semantic-only baseline and remains robust as semantic clutter increases. Overall, the paper argues that affordance ontologies can serve not merely as semantic descriptions of the environment, but as reasoning foundations for explainability and reliable robot autonomy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00117
Critical decision-making in socially consequential spaces is increasingly involving AI systems at varying capacities. Yet, despite the ubiquity of autonomous systems, most approaches to handling autonomous moral decision-making resort to scalar or binary judgments. These methods are insufficient for acceptable moral reasoning, as they provide little explanation, leaving out imperative contextual and theoretical information that must be included to support accountability. For this, we propose a framework to model moral reasoning as a distribution over normative ethical theories or ethical pluralism. We introduce a normative ethics simplex that integrates these theories. A benchmark of 450 cases across 15 fine-grained subtheories was also prepared for the purposes of stacked ensemble learning. These cases describe ethical dilemmas in natural language and have associated extracted contextual features. The implementation of the simplex was achieved via a two-stream normative-semantic architecture. This is followed by the fusion of normative information and a sequential, stacking ensemble to learn the best fit of the three broad theories: consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology, and the 15 subcategories. Our experiments demonstrate that the integration of contextual and normative priors with the semantic embeddings significantly improves the performance of the classification, displaying an accuracy of 88.89%. We conducted ablation studies to show that structured ethical representations contribute beyond analogical reasoning, and the chosen stacking architecture gives the best results due to the gradual learning of granularity. Ethical pluralism is also analyzed through entropy, confidence, and visualization. Thus, modeling ethical pluralism as a probabilistic normative distribution supports human-like moral reasoning, ethical disagreement analysis, and future alignment in AI systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28707
Knowledge graphs (KGs) can provide structured scientific context to language models, but it remains unclear which graph facts actually shape the generated hypotheses. We study KG-guided hypothesis generation for battery materials across Mistral-7B, Llama-3.1-70B, and Gemini 2.5 Flash. We perturb local KGs by varying density, ontology richness, topology, and control structure, and evaluate outputs with both provided-graph and fixed-reference metrics. Across models, KG utility is selective and model-dependent: graph context changes outputs, but no-KG outputs also recover substantial graph content from model priors. Compact top-k subgraphs often approximate full-KG behavior, including when claimed-outcome triples are held out. At the same time, compression is not unique to one semantic ranking rule, random and topology-based subsets can also recover much of the signal. These results support a redundancy-aware Compressive KG hypothesis: useful KG signal is often recoverable from compact, scientifically structured subgraphs rather than requiring the full local graph.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27176
AI governance is shifting from voluntary ethics to enforceable, risk-based regulation, yet cross-jurisdictional divergence creates compliance uncertainty for operators of high-stakes AI. We present a comparative matrix for the EU, US, and China that maps (i) risk classification triggers, (ii) binding obligations, (iii) enforcement and accountability mechanisms, and (iv) the degree to which FAIR principles are operationalised in practice. We stress-test the matrix on three high-impact domains: Electroencephalography (EEG)-guided rehabilitation robotics, AI-enabled debt collection in prospective Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) ecosystems, and AI-driven allocation of scarce Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) resources in emerging AI Factory infrastructures. Using primary legal texts and implementation evidence, we identify three recurring gaps: weak interoperability mandates, difficult operationalisation of cross-regime obligations (AI + sector regulation + data protection), and under-specified governance for critical digital infrastructure use cases. To bridge the implementation gap, we outline Knowledge Blocks, a machine-checkable compliance artefact pattern based on Resource Description Framework/Web Ontology Language (RDF/OWL), Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), and Provenance Ontology (PROV-O), enabling audit-ready compliance-by-design across multiple regimes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14562
Cross-lingual transfer in language models is difficult to study in natural corpora because lexical overlap, morphology, data imbalance, and tokenization are entangled. We introduce an in-vitro framework with two procedurally generated languages that share the same ontology, typed grammar, and compositional structure, but differ in surface realization. This lets us independently vary lexical distance, minority-language proportion, tokenizer training regime, and vocabulary size, while evaluating transfer on a masked minority-language condition whose lexical forms are never observed during training. Across 700 controlled runs, we find that transfer is governed less by tokenizer balance or raw lexical similarity than by whether tokenization preserves reusable cross-lingual substructure. Smaller vocabularies often improve masked transfer by keeping words decomposable into shared fragments, whereas larger vocabularies can turn forms into language-specific atoms. We further show that transfer emerges as a staged process: grammatical and type-level competence precede masked lexical generalization. Finally, we attempt to explain this mechanism through tokenizer bridges and show that bridge strength correlates strongly with masked reachability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26683
Objective. Outpatient notes carry follow-up instructions pairing actions with future times ("MRI brain in two weeks"). Extracting (action, date) pairs supports scheduling and audit, but generative extractors miss the date because linking and arithmetic are implicit in decoding. We test a hybrid neural-symbolic pipeline against direct generation. Methods. We define TestSpecification and TimeSpecification entities and a ScheduledFor relation. BioBERT feeds BIO tagging and a biaffine linker; entities are canonicalized via a 28-action ontology and times normalized to day offsets deterministically. We evaluate on a 2,000-note synthetic outpatient corpus with action-disjoint splits (18 train, 6 OOV-test) against zero-shot GPT-4o-mini and LoRA-fine-tuned LLaMA-3 8B with note-level bootstrap 95% CIs. Results. On 259-note seen and OOV splits the hybrid pipeline achieves Test-Time Pair F1 of 0.997 and 0.986 with 0.00-day MAE. Baselines reach high action F1 (LLaMA-3 0.992; GPT-4o-mini 0.963 seen) but Pair F1 stays at 0.51-0.57 (LLaMA-3) and 0.53 (GPT-4o-mini), CIs non-overlapping with the hybrid. Conclusion. Separating learned entity extraction from deterministic date arithmetic outperforms generation on this benchmark, generalizes to held-out actions, and exposes failure modes. Transfer to real EHR notes is the next validation; a first-pass realism check is in Limitations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26560
Clinical pathways are disseminated as visual flowcharts where spatial topology, arrow direction, colour coding, and font weight encode critical triage logic that remains inaccessible to computational systems. We present PathWISE, a five-phase pipeline combining four LLM-based agents with a deterministic depth-first search auditor and a Java compiler critic, transforming these non-computable artefacts into validated, executable HL7 Clinical Quality Language (CQL) libraries deployable as FHIR CDS Hooks services. Purpose-built agents extract flowchart structure into a typed directed graph, perform deterministic path enumeration, conduct a structured semantic audit of every node's computability, generate terminology-constrained CQL definitions verified by the official Java CQL-to-ELM compiler, and produce routing logic covering 100% of enumerated patient journeys. Demonstrated across five UK NHS cancer pathways (colorectal, lung, skin, upper GI, and breast), PathWISE audits up to 183 nodes (182 under the Hybrid configuration), identifies 544 structured governance findings across four issue categories, achieves 100% syntactic compilation success, with UNCOMPUTABLE nodes receiving false placeholders that preserve compilability while surfacing governance gaps for clinical review, and produces zero hallucinated terminology codes for dictionary-covered concepts. Critically, PathWISE confines non-deterministic LLM inference to knowledge extraction while deterministic graph mathematics and a standard compiler underpin every verification step.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25970
Visual analytics (VA) workflows are inherently complex, involving data transformation, feature engineering, visual representation, and human interpretation. They are typically described in unstructured prose, hindering systematic comparison, reuse of proven strategies, and training of novices. We present Artifact-Transform Workflow Language (ATWL), a domain-agnostic, declarative language that formally represents VA workflows by capturing their structure and underlying analytical intent. ATWL is built upon a modular ontology of eight artifact types (entities, features, arrangements, visualisations, patterns, models, knowledge, specifications) and transforms characterised by standardised intents (e.g., define-unit, characterise, contextualise, abstract). To show that formalisation effort need not impede adoption, we extract workflows from research papers through supervised interaction with LLM agents, reducing the human role to review and refinement. Using this process, we constructed a library of seventeen ATWL workflows from published VA papers. Cross-workflow analysis reveals structural regularities -- a recurrent meta-structure, recurring motifs, reusable building blocks, diverse iterative strategies, and cross-domain equivalences -- that remain invisible in prose. We further evaluate practical utility through a controlled experiment in which the same LLM addressed two analytical problems with the library supplied either as original papers or as ATWL representations. Both forms enabled useful recommendations, but the formal representation systematically added explicit iteration structure, typed data flow, fragment-level adaptation provenance, and compactness supporting scaling beyond what prose libraries can fit in an LLM's context. ATWL enables a transition from narrative descriptions to formally represented, comparable, and reusable analytical knowledge.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25489
Ontologies represent the conceptual knowledge of a domain. At the core of an ontology is the taxonomy of concepts and subconcepts that represent specific entities, which can be complex to build. In many cases, information is available in the form of records describing the characteristics of relevant entities, i.e., tabular data. Identifying patterns and similarities in such data can serve as a basis for identifying concepts and organizing them. However, doing so manually can be challenging, and purely automatic approaches, such as agglomerative clustering or relying on a large language model to analyze the data, can leave the user with overwhelming results and little control. In this paper, we describe a tool that enables the progressive and interactive construction of a taxonomy of concepts by identifying clusters as well as their intentional definitions. To do so, we rely on weighted self-organizing maps as a clustering method because they enable the creation of an arbitrary number of clusters that are distinct with respect to the distributions of values of specific characteristics of the clustered entities. We show that, by integrating this mechanism and others for rapidly creating concepts that group together instances from tabular data, this tool represents a middle ground between purely manual analysis and automatic methods for building ontological taxonomies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24899