The AURA project aims to formally capture the contents of a high school biology textbook and develop an electronic textbook capable of answering a student's questions. We describe the challenges of ontological modelling of biological knowledge, and of developing an interface that enables non-technical users to enter knowledge. A core component of the system's reasoning is grounded as path queries between concepts in the resulting knowledge base. We describe the challenges of efficiently answering queries to obtain relevant and high quality answers, and of presenting the answers suitably for end users. A video demonstration of the Inquire iPad application will conclude the talk.

Neil Yorke-Smith is an Assistant Professor of Business Information and Decision Systems at the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business, American University of Beirut, and a Research Scientist at SRI International, USA. His research focuses on technologies that assist human decision making, with interests including intelligent agents, preference modelling, constraint-based reasoning, intelligent user interfaces,planning and scheduling, and their real world applications. Publications and further information are available at http://www.aub.edu.lb/~nysmith