About Amine Platform

                by

                Adil KABBAJ

                Last update: January 2008

                Version 5

Amine Group is composed actually of its founder, Pr. Adil Kabbaj, and of its permanent member: Pr. Karim Bouzoubaa.

You can communicate with Amine Group by sending an email to administrator of Amine.

Founder

Pr. Adil Kabbaj is the founder and the main actor in the design and implementation of Amine Platform. His M. Sc. (1985-1987, Laval University, Quebec) and Ph. D. (1992-1996, Montreal University, Quebec) constitute the basis of Amine Platform: the main components of Amine, i.e. CG operations, CG LF parser, Prolog+CG, Synergy and dynamic formation of a knowledge base have been developed in Adil's M. Sc. and Ph.D. thesis. Adil has been improving these components since 1996.

Permanent Members

1. Pr. Karim Bouzoubaa decided to work with Adil on Amine Platform in April 2003. Adil and Karim formed the Amine Group. Karim developed the first web site of Amine and participated in the preparation of the release of the first version. He worked on the Java implementation of dynamic ontology engine and on other aspects of the platform. He is responsible for the multi-agent module of Amine Platform. His research interests are multi-agent systems and Question Answering Systems.

Participants (students)

Karim Mankar Bennis and Youssef Ghaouta, students from INSEA, are the designer of the first page of Amine web site 2 (December 2003)

Ontologies presented in SAMPLES have been developed by several students from INSEA:

    buildDictionaryOntology : An ontology developed from "MY FIRST INCREDIBLE AMAZING

        DICTIONARY", by DANGUIR Abdessamad, AZWAOU Med and MANSOUR Taha (December 2003),

    buildKMOntology : An ontology developed from an example proposed in Knowledge Machine

        Manual, by Elalami Sanae and Chiadmi Fadwa (December 2003),

    buildPathologieAviaireOntology : An ontology developed from a CD on poultry Pathology,        

        by SLIM Badreddine (December 2003).

Khalil Ferhat, student from INSEA, worked in summer'04 on graph edition and graph drawing,

Said Ladib, student from INSEA, worked in summer'04 on the integration of Synergy in Amine Platform

El Hachemi Khalid, student from INSEA, worked in summer'04 on the definition, implementation and use of two processes related to Ontology: Question/Answering and Composition of Concept Description.

Kaoutar ElHari, worked on the multi-agents systems layer of Amine platform in the context of her DESA degree. See MAS Layer for more detail.

Nabil Ourdani, former student from INSEA, worked on ontology graphic editor. See Ontology GUI for more detail.

Rida Benhammane, former student from INSEA, developed the game TIJARI using Prolog+CG.

Meryem Hajjam and Farah Saidi, former students from INSEA, developed a micro-version of OCCAM using Amine Platform.

Amine Rahimi, student from INSEA, developed the new home page of Amine Web Site 5.0.

Collaborators

1. In the context of Flexnet project (development of flexible on-line courses), Pr. Peter Ohrstrom and his team from Human Informatics in Aalborg University, Denmark, have developed an online course on Conceptual Graph Theory and Prolog+CG. During a three-day workshop (23 to 25 March 2004, in Aalborg), Adil presented Amine to this group. As a result of this workshop, the group planed to develop online courses on Amine Platform. Henrik Scharfe, an active member of this team, used Prolog+CG in his master thesis and in his Ph.D. thesis. He is also interested in the use of Amine platform.

2. A collaboration between Amine Group and the team of Pr. Dalila Chiadmi and Pr. Ounsa Roudies (from EMI, Rabat) has been established.

3. Adil and a team of students headed by Pr. Bernard Moulin from Laval University explored a collaborative research agenda on the use and improvement of Prolog+CG in 2001.

Amine Platform brief history

Amine Platform results from 19 years of extensive research done by Pr. Adil Kabbaj concerning several threads in Conceptual Graphs Theory. A brief history of this work will put Amine Platform in its proper context.

In his master thesis (1985-1987), Adil was interested in the design and implementation of a CG manipulation system: implementation of type hierarchy and their operations as well as CG and Conceptual Structures with their operations (maximal join, generalize, project, contract, expand). Both simple and compound CG with coreferents were considered. CG operations were not defined in terms of John Sowa formation rules but as a specialization of a generic matching operation. Amine Platform is indebt to this pragmatic and algorithmic approach of CG operations definition and implementation.

Between 1987 and 1992, Adil began to explore several aspects related to CG theory: extension of Prolog to support CG, dynamic formation of CG knowledge base and development of an interpreter for data flow graphs. During that period, Karim Bouzoubaa, who was a Bachelor Student at INSEA, explored some aspects of the generalization-based memory model developed by Adil.

In his Ph. D. (1992-1996), Adil developed these aspects as well as CG editors and notations (especially graphic and linear forms editors). Four products resulted from this work : a package of CG operations, Prolog++ (renamed Prolog+CG later) which is a CG extension of Prolog, Synergy which is a visual CG activation based language, and a dynamic memory formation engine. Between 1996 and 2001, Adil continued to develop these products. During the fall-spring of 2001, Adil gave a course at Laval University on Prolog+CG and had many discussions with Pr. Bernard Moulin and his students. The idea and need of a modular platform that integrates all the modules developed by Adil and that provides a multi-level architecture with basic APIs has become more and more insistent since that time. Meanwhile, ontology topic became more and more central in artificial intelligence and in the CG community. It becomes clear that a modular CG platform should integrate ontology at the kernel level. Amine Platform fulfils this recommandation since its kernel concerns the creation, consultation, update, and use of multi-lingua ontology.

Acknowledgement (by A. Kabbaj)

Acknowledgment is a web of thanks to many people, directly or indirectly involved in this project. I apologize for all who are not mentioned in this section but should be !

Thanks to my parents who helped and supported me during all the years, always ready to give and ask for nothing. They supported my travel to Canada for my bachelor (1982-1985) and my master (1985-1987) studies at Laval University, Quebec, Canada.

Special thanks to Pr Bernard Moulin who was my master thesis supervisor. He gave to me John Sowa’s first book (1984) and proposed to me to develop and implement a Conceptual Graph Manipulation System. At that time, I discovered John Sowa and his encyclopedic mind. Since then, John and his work has never left my mind. Special thanks to John for his work and his kindness (he accepted to be a member of my Ph. D. thesis jury in 1996).

Special thanks to Pr Claude Frasson who was my Ph. D. supervisor at the University of Montreal (1992-1996) and let me free to work on several aspects of Conceptual Graph Theory.

I would like to express my gratitude to the Aalborg group (Peter Ohrstrom, Henrik Scharfe, Ulrik Petersen, and Jorgen Albretsen): the current version of Amine gained insight from the invaluable discussion we had on Amine during the workshop  (23 to 25 March 2004, Aalborg, Danish).

Great thanks to my family; my wife Hafida and my three sons: Hamza, Amine (who died physically but is still present in our hearts) and Youssef for their unlimited support, love and patience.

Related publications

- Kabbaj A., Development of Intelligent Systems and Multi-Agents Systems with Amine Platform, in 15th Int. Conf. on Conceptual Structures, ICCS'2006, Springer-Verlag, 2006.

- Kabbaj A., K. Bouzoubaa, K. ElHachimi and N. Ourdani, Ontology in Amine Platform: Structures and Processes, in the 14th Proc. Int. Conf. Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2006, Aalborg, Denmark, 2006.

- Kabbaj A., Moulin B., An algorithmic definition of CG operations based on a bootstrap step, in Proc. Of the International Conference on Conceptual structures ICCS, San Francisco, August, 2001.

- Kabbaj A. and al., Uses, Improvements and Extensions of Prolog+CG: Case studies, in Proc. Of the International Conference on Conceptual structures ICCS, San Francisco, August, 2001.

- Bouzouba K., Moulin B., Kabbaj A., CG-KQML+: An Agent Communication Language and its use in a Multi-Agent System, in Proc. Of the International Conference on Conceptual structures ICCS, San Francisco, August, 2001.

- Kabbaj A. et M. Janta, From PROLOG++ to PROLOG+CG : an object-oriented logic programming, in Proc. Of the International Conference on Conceptual Structures ICCS'2000, Darmstadt, Allemagne, Août, 2000.

- Kabbaj A., Synergy: a conceptual graph activation-based language, in Proc. Of the 7th International Conference on Conceptual Structures ICCS'99, 1999.

- Kabbaj A., Synergy as an Hybrid Object-Oriented Conceptual Graph Language, in Proc. Of the 7th International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS’99), Springer-Verlag, 1999.

- Kabbaj A., H. Erramli and K. Mousaid, An integration-based approach to dynamic formation of a knowledge-base: The method and its applications, submitted to the 7th Int. Conf. on Conceptual Structures (ICCS'99), 1999.

- Kabbaj A., Un système multi-paradigme pour la manipulation des connaissances utilisant la théorie des graphes conceptuels, Ph. D. Thesis, Univ. De Montreal, Canada, 1996.

- Kabbaj A., Self-Organizing Knowledge Bases: The Integration Based Approach, in the Proc. Of the Int. KRUSE Symposium: Knowledge Retrieval, Use, and Storage for Efficiency, Santa Cruz, CA, USA, p. 64-68, 1995.

- Moulin B. and A. Kabbaj (1990), SMGC : a tool for conceptual graphs processing, In The Journal for the integrated study of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and applied epistemology, 7:1.

- Kabbaj A., SMGC : un système de manipulation des graphes conceptuels, M. Sc. Thesis, Univ. Laval, Canada, 1987.