Grounding ontologies in the external world

The paper discusses a case study of grounding an ontology in the external world by a cognitive architecture for robot vision developed at the RoboticsLab of the University of Palermo. The architecture aims at representing symbolic knowledge extracted from visual data related to static and dynamic scenarios. The central assumption is the principled integration of a robot vision system with a symbolic system underlying the knowledge representation of the scene. Such an integration is based on a conceptual level of representation intermediate between the sub-symbolic processing of visual data and the declarative style employed in the ontological representation.