The PRAXICON is a conceptual knowledge base in which concepts have both symbolic (e.g. natural language) and corresponding sensorimotor representations, while associations among them are pragmatic in nature and recursive. The resource has been developed to allow artificial agents/systems:
- to tie concepts/words of different levels of abstraction to their sensorimotor instantiations (catering thus for disambiguation), and
- to untie sensorimotor representations from their physical specificities correlating them to conceptual structures of different levels of abstraction (catering thus for intentionality indication).
The PRAXICON database is a 3rd normal form database that stores information on embodied concepts. The design of the database ensures that any application that uses the PRAXICON knowledge base and its tools will have easy access to the stored data, with minimum overhead. To this end, we have included some features that are not currently used by the POETICON project applications, but will be useful for future extensions of the PRAXICON and use in different applications (e.g. in machine translation).
The core entity of the database is the Concept table. It connects concepts/words of different levels of abstraction to their sensorimotor and visual instantiations. Each concept can have a motoric and/or visual representation. Also each Concept can be member of some relations. These relations can be described as a triplet of the following form: Concept A – Relation – Concept B, which means that Concept A is related with some relation to Concept B. These relations are always bidirectional, so the aforementioned triplet also stands for Concept B is related (with the reverse relation) with Concept A.
These triplets are the simplest form of a relation. Relations can be combined to Relations Chains in order to form more complex relations. Relations Chains can further be combined to Intersections of Relations Chains and these Intersections can form Unions of Intersections. Justification of these complex relations can be found further in the document. Each Concept can have one or more Unions of Intersections.
There are three possible ways to get the PraxiconDB:
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Get the latest stable release from https://github.com/CSRI/PraxiconDB/tags.
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Get the latest development version by creating a local fork of the project on your Git account and clone it locally at https://github.com/CSRI/PraxiconDB.git.
For installation and usage instructions please refer to the documentation in the manuals under docs/.
If you spot any bugs, please report them to the GitHub's issue tracker: https://github.com/CSRI/PraxiconDB/issues.
If you would like to contribute to the project, just fork it and send pull requests with your changes.