fosdem.org

I am interested in artificial intelligence, particularly in the background knowledge needed by an AI. I believe the Semantic Web is the key to setting up a large interconnected knowledge base that will allow a new form of intelligence to emerge. I am working along three axes around semantic technologies:

* Ontology alignment: ontology alignment relates to the techniques and processes allowing to construct bridges between heterogeneous ontologies modeling a similar domain. I develop a language called EDOAL: Expressive and Declarative Ontology Alignment Language allowing to represent complex correspondences between the entities of two ontologies. This language allows for a high-level representation of ontology alignments. I have also worked on a SPARQL extension for the transformation of instance data.

* Ontology and correspondence patterns: Anyone who tried to build an ontology will tell it, it is a difficult task. In order to facilitate this task ontology patterns come as reusable pieces of knowledge that can be assembled together in order to build the ontology. I am participating in the effort to construct a comprehensive catalog of ontology patterns: http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org. I was particularly involved through my PhD thesis in the modeling of correspondence patterns, relating together similar ontology patterns.

* Application to linked-data: The Web of data is an emerging giant interconnected database. It uses semantic technologies and the Web as a support. The Web of data offers an incredible source of data for mining equivalence relations and patterns between ontologies and data. The Web of data also raises new problems related to the scale of the data published. It requires to develop new methods to store, access and manipulate the data. I am applying ontology alignment techniques to the Web of data in order to accelerate its emergence. I particularly concentrate on automating the process of finding equivalent resources. I am also interested in analyzing its structure in order to find regularities.

I develop the research themes developed above in a number of research projects related to the semantic-Web.