Just realised that the last post on this blog dated December 2008… a lot has happened since then. For one, I became the father of Lieve.

Less importantly, I submitted the manuscript of my dissertation just before Christmas… luckily it was accepted, and I became a ‘doctor’ on the 18th of September this year (took a while because of planning issues…).

My dissertation was published by IOS Press and has the title “Ontology Representation – Design Patterns and Ontologies that Make Sense“. It really turned into a proper book, with (I think) several good introductory chapters on (the history of) knowledge representation, the requirements imposed on knowledge representation languages and on ontologies. I have tried to demystify several assumptions underlying ontology engineering related to methodologies and reusability, and describe a structured approach to ontology representation (that is, the construction of ontologies used as knowledge representation artefacts). This approach has brought forth several quite elaborate design patterns that make extensive use of the new OWL 2 constructs (such as role chains, self restrictions and qualified cardinality).

The book is available from Amazon, and other online outlets, but can also be browsed in digital form through the DARE repository of the University of Amsterdam.

Another fairly big change is that since the first of March, I am ‘on loan’ to the AI department of the Vrije Universiteit, to work on the BEST project. I am very lucky to be able to spend my weekdays at one of the foremost research departments on knowledge representation and the Semantic Web.

Related articles by Zemanta

• OWL 2 is a W3C Recommmendation (w3.org)
• Observations from OWL Experiences and Directions 2009 (phaneron.rickmurphy.org)

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