User:VitNovacek

Relevant Background

Since 2007, I've been a PhD student at DERI, Galway, however, I've spent there some time even before that as a research intern. My primary "official" responsibility in the last 13 months has been helping with co-ordination of the research in the ontology dynamics work-package of Knowledge Web, a rather large EU project, where I've already met some of the fellow WG members. In this context, I've also been involved in the design and implementation of a simple ontology integration library, primarily focused at semi-automatic integration of light-weight OWL ontologies into more complex ones.

Moreover, since April 2007 I've become responsible for transfer of a relevant portion of the Knowledge Web achievements into one of the deliverables of the W3C SWD WG. So I have some, though still quite fresh, experience with participation in the W3C groups. My "personal" interests (i.e., my thesis topic) are related to reasoning (uncertain and not necessarily logics-based) with automatically extracted knowledge (e.g., output of data-mining or ontology learning algorithms).

Contact Info

My primary contact is this e-mail, you can use also the office phone number (+353 91 495738) or ask me for whatever other means of contact you'd like to use, should the need arise...

Expectations

My overall expectations are two-fold:

• Very high-level and optimistic vision of the desired output of this group would be a new OWL recommendation that would:
  • build on the essential principles specified in the submission documents and,
  • present a knowledge representation language comprehensible, if not directly usable, by my mother, or at least by my IT-literate, but not IT-expert sister.
• I'd be more than happy to see at least some explicit guidelines on how to represent uncertainty in the new OWL version as a part of the final recommendation set of documents.

Supposed Contributions

I hope to be able to contribute to the topics discussed within the group and assist in the progress of the group where I can. Moreover, I'd like to specifically contribute to any efforts related to the second point in the previous paragraph, i.e. to uncertainty representation in the future OWL. I presume I'd co-operate mainly with Jeff and Giorgos on this within the group, since they were mentioned as contact persons concerning this activity in the scope of OWLED here. If needed, I'd be happy to elaborate my initial views (which are maybe not directly "entailed" by the group charter, but at the same time, they are definitely not contrary or counter-productive w.r.t. the essential issues this group has been primarily commited to). As a kind of minor and somehow tricky, but potentially interesting issue, I'd be eager to contribute to an investigation of relations between OWL model-theoretic semantics and (?lexical?) semantics of natural language expressions that can be associated with the respective ontology elements (classes, roles, individuals); maybe Anne and/or Enrico would be interested in this, too? ...should the group find these efforts worthwhile and feasible besides the dense programme of the charter, of course.