I am currently (since June 2006) working as a research fellow at the knowledge media institute (KMi) in the Open University of Milton Keynes, UK. In december 2005, I obtained my PhD. in computer science at the UHP University of Nancy, France. My main research interest (i.e. the one that is common to my PhD and my current work at KMi) is the Semantic Web.
Research
PhD: I obtained my PhD from the UHP-Nancy 1 Univeristy of Nancy, France in December 2005. The title of the thesis (translated from French) was ``A Semantic Portal for Knowledge Management in Oncology''. Quickly summarized, it concerned the integration and application of some classical AI techniques (in particular classification based reasoning, case-based reasoning, fuzzy logic) together with Semantic Web technologies (specifically OWL, ontology based tools, description logic reasoning) to support knowledge management and decision support in the very challenging domain of cancer treatment.
This work is summarized in this page in French and this page in English.
Within the NeOn Project: I am currently mainly working in the NeOn project, that concerns lifecycle support for Networked Ontologies. Within NeOn, I contribute to several tasks (Ontology selection, comparison, alignment, etc.), but I am more particularly in charge of the task concerning ontology modularization, as well as in the development of Watson and of related technologies.
Ontology Modularization: Ontology Modularization refers the identification and combination of significant and reusable ontology components: modules. There are mainly two research directions in ontology modularization curently: languages and methodologies to support the design of modular ontologies, and techniques to extract modules from existing ontologies. The work done in NeOn relates to both aspects. See the page on Ontology Modularization for more details, in particular concerning the work done on extracting modules from ontologies and the tools developed for that purpose.
Watson and Next Generation Semantic Web Applications: I am coordinating the development of Watson, which is a Semantic Web gateway. In a way similar to seacrh engines on the Web, Watson collects, analyses and indexes semantic documents (in RDF, OWL, DAML+OIL) in order to provide a variety of access mechanisms to this semantic data for intelligent applications. The idea is to support applications that requires to dynamically find, select and exploit the increasing amount of knowledge available online (that we call next generation semantic web applications). A more complete description of Watson is available on its website, and the latest development and news concerning Watson are generally announced on the Watson Blog.
A number of applications have already been developed that dynamically exploit online knowledge thanks to Watson. In particular, I am (with the help of Fouad Zablith) in charge of the development of plugins for ontology editors that allow for a large scale reuse of existing knowledge on the Web. I also (quickly) developed an application called gowgle that suggests additional keywords to a query addressed to Google using the semantic relations linking these terms in online ontologies. I also contributed to the development of Scarlet, a relation discovery engine used in particular in ontology matching, and of PowerMagpie a Semantic browser based on Watson.
Websites, organization, supervision, etc.
- I am currently the supervisor (with Enrico Motta) of Carlo Alloca who is doing a PhD on the management of semantic relations between ontologies. I also participate to the supervision of Fouad Zablith (primeraly supervised by Marta Sabou, with Enrico Motta), working on ontology evolution.
- I maintain or use to maintain the following websites: The Watson interface, website and blog, the Beautiful Ontologies portal that may one day be more than just an empty page, the webpage of the International workshop on ontology dynamics, IWOD 2007, and the webpages for the Kasimir and Katexowl software.
Mathieu d'Aquin - last modification: 11/12/2007.