Session	Ontologies and AI
Duration	1 hour
Date/Time	18 Mar 2026 16:00 GMT
	9:00am PDT/12:00pm EDT
	4:00pm GMT/5:00pm CET
Convener	Gary Berg-Cross

Ontology Summit 2026 Ontologies and AI

• Pascal Hitzler Some Advances in Neurosymbolic AI Related to Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs
• Slides
• Video Recording
• Neurosymbolic AI, as the combination of deep learning and knowledge representation/reasoning methods, is currently receiving significant attention due to its promise to both overcome apparent limitations of pure deep learning systems, and to address the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. This presentation will focus on some recent research advances made at Kansas State University related to Ontologies, Knowledge Graphs and neurosymbolic AI, with particular emphasis on the use of large language models for knowledge graph and ontology engineering, and the use of symbolic AI methods for AI explainability.
• Bio: Pascal Hitzler is University Distinguished Professor and endowed Lloyd T. Smith Creativity in Engineering Chair at the Department of Computer Science at Kansas State University, Director (Research) of the Institute for Digital Agriculture and Advanced Analytics (ID3A), and Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (CAIDS). He serves on the Kansas Legislature AI Taskforce and on the Samsung AI Advisory Board. His research record lists over 400 publications in such diverse areas as neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence, semantic web, knowledge graphs, knowledge representation and reasoning, denotational semantics, and set-theoretic topology, with over 19,000 citations. He was founding Editor-in-chief of the Semantic Web journal, the leading journal in the field, and is founding Editor-in-chief of the new Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence journal. He is co-author of the W3C Recommendation OWL 2 Primer, and of the book Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies by CRC Press, 2010, which was named as one out of seven Outstanding Academic Titles 2010 in Information and Computer Science by the American Library Association's Choice Magazine, and has translations into German and Chinese. He is founding steering committee member of the Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning Association and the Association for Ontology Design and Patterns. For more information about him, see http://www.pascal-hitzler.de.

Conference Call Information

• Date: Wednesday, 18 March 2026
• Start Time: 9:00am PDT / 12:00pm EDT / 5:00pm CET / 4:00pm GMT / 1600 UTC
  • ref: World Clock
  • Note: The US and Canada are on Daylight Saving Time while Europe has not yet changed.
• Expected Call Duration: 1 hour
• Video Conference URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86994661673?pwd=mMUeaWyWhBMSzTw3SgH5GjMv2Qx4rH.1
  • Meeting ID: 869 9466 1673
  • Passcode: 803090
• Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.
  • Weekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/tZIkfu2uqDosHddtIR_XTIoQlXKQbDMLAing/ics?icsToken=DCmtbHKw6UkYvhXO1AAALAAAADorLjwBqUy1j8CrHtKZOzjPeUmMLYQ3XMGusEqr55Acc-ytgOkxl_cBUf2s1j36Jw38ZPHY_ofJ9thYEjAwMDAwMQ&meetingMasterEventId=8dTP3JiuSzqD32pYF8wsXQ

Discussion

12:10:08 Randy Goebel : A question arising from this one of training deep learning to do deductive reasoning also emerges from the Dan Kahneman system 1, system 2 thinking: can system 2 thinking emerge from system 1 processing?

12:28:51 Randy Goebel : https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04589#:~:text=10%20Jan%202023%5D-,Memory%20Augmented%20Large%20Language%20Models%20are%20Computationally%20Universal,a%20specific%20set%20of%20prompts.

• Michael DeBellis : 👍

12:52:13 Gary Berg-Cross : One might say that LLMs can provide some version of background knowledge as text to use as a frame based on its vector space "neighborhood" .

13:17:34 Randy Goebel : thanks for the very large collection of ideas … I have a lot to digest from this.

• Pascal Hitzler : 👍

13:20:32 Vojtěch Svátek : Pascal, regarding complex alignment: did you play with onto transformation patterns? E.g., in your example, after transforming the first onto by importing the Agenrole pattern, the ontos might be aligneable 1-1.

13:23:22 Ankit : So for each domain or topic we have to create an ontology module?Isn't a way to generalized all the domain into a particular framework, otherwise I think it's exploding

13:24:11 Harshit : Pascal, when you project a symbolic domain into a predefined ontology, does the resulting representation preserve enough structure to reconstruct the original input using the same LLM?

13:26:31 Bobbin Teegarden : 'purpose' = perspective, context?

13:26:38 Gary Berg-Cross : It might be interesting to consider if what we identify as system 1 (reactive) or 2 (deliberate) makes humans better at some things. This may vary by the nature of the domain problem. Worth a look perhaps.

13:30:07 Randy Goebel : Thanks a lot … from the last two sessions, I have a lot to inform my next steps about where to look for the structural interaction across different neurosymbolic platforms.

• Pascal Hitzler : 👍

13:30:20 Pascal Hitzler : hitzler@ksu.edu

• Harshit : 👍

13:32:32 Marcela Vegetti : Excellent talk, thank you!

• Pascal Hitzler : 👍

13:32:40 Harshit : thanks

• Pascal Hitzler : 👍

Resources

• Slides
• Video Recording
• YouTube Video

Previous Meetings

	Session
ConferenceCall 2026 03 11	Ontologies and AI
ConferenceCall 2026 03 04	Ontologies and AI
ConferenceCall 2026 02 25	Retrospective
... further results

Next Meetings

	Session
ConferenceCall 2026 03 25	Ontologies and AI
ConferenceCall 2026 04 01	Foundations and Tools