Tuesday, 19 May 2015

Ask Data Anything

Ask Data Anything is Cognitum's approach to exploring data by using a subset of natural language which articulates concepts and instances modeled in ontologies to provide a meaningful quering experience. Ask Data Anything seizes on regularities of language to provide a natural interpretation of queries being asked; its semantics are provided via R and rOntorion (alternatively  F# and Ontorion).

Technically, Ask Data Anything is capable of performing projection, sub-setting, grouping and aggregation operations, providing answers for queries involving the following information:
  • What? Any of the columns of your data table are considered a quantitative field over which to perform queries,
  • How? How the output is to be shown. The results of the query can be retrieved on either a table, histogram or a map,
  • Where? (Optional) The "in" preposition allows to restrict the search to an specific named group of items  as happens for instance with continents which can be seeing as a group of countries,
  • Of? (Optional) The "of" preposition allows to dive into the data, restricting the desired results to a certain set of types (concepts in the Fluent Editor sense) by searching the data in a certain column for instances (in Fluent Editor sense) of those types; we call this material sub-setting,
  • By? (Optional) By which type (in Fluent Editor sense) you would like to group the results for aggregation purposes.
  • When? (Optional) Queries can contain time constraints.