System interoperability is an important issue, widely recognized in information technology intensive organizations and in the research community of information systems. The wide adoption of the World Wide Web to access and distribute information further stress the need for system interoperability. Initiatives like the SemanticWeb strive to allow software agents to locate and integrate data in a...

Robots that are launched in the consumer market need to provide more effective human robot interaction, and, in particular, spoken language interfaces. However, in order to support the execution of high level commands as they are specified in natural language, a semantic map is required. Such a map is a representation that enables the robot to ground the commands into the actual places and obje...

After decades of unrealistic predictions and expectations, robots have finally escaped from industrial workplaces and made their way into our homes, offices, museums and other public spaces. These service robots are increasingly present in our environments and many believe that it is in the area of service and domestic robotics that we will see the largest growth within the next few years. In o...

Most mobile robotic systems use internal representations of the gathered information that is not intuitively understandable by humans and that is inadequate for learning from commonly available sources. The combination of object/place classification and common-sense knowledge to semantic maps found its way into indoor semantic mapping approaches in order to improve human-robot interaction. The ...

The paper proposes different solutions to integrate CERIF in the environmental dataset domain, based on the quality of semantic mapping as well as on the characteristics of the CERIF data model. A two-way crosswalk is described resulting in the identification of a core of corresponding metadata and a proposal of extensions of the CERIF model. Extensions of ISO concepts are also described to pro...

The way in which prosody contributes to meaning is still, today, a poorly understood process corresponding to a mapping between two levels of representation, for neither of which there is any general consensus. It is argued that annotation of prosody generally consists in describing both prosodic function and prosodic form, but that it would be preferable to clearly distinguish the two levels. ...

Semantic perception for intelligent systems and robots remains an active area of research with many recent advances that address a variety of problems. One key requirement that these systems have is to reason in spaces exceeding their local perceptual space. For example, a personal robot operating in human living spaces needs to continuously acquire and semantically understand perceptual inform...

The problem of understanding road scenes has been on the fore-front in the computer vision community for the last couple of years. This enables autonomous systems to navigate and understand the surroundings in which it operates. It involves reconstructing the scene and estimating the objects present in it, such as ‘vehicles’, ‘road’, ‘pavements’ and ‘buildings’. This thesis focusses on these as...

For intelligent robotics applications, extending 3D mapping to 3D semantic mapping enables robots to, not only localize themselves with respect to the scene’s geometrical features but also simultaneously understand the higher level meaning of the scene contexts. Most previous methods focus on geometric 3D reconstruction and scene understanding independently notwithstanding the fact that joint e...