10 May Daniel Lupp defends his PhD Thesis

Daniel P. Lupp defended his dissertation for the degree of PhD on 7th May 2019

The title of his thesis was“A Higher-Level View of Ontological Modeling: Rule-Based Approaches for Data Transformation, Modeling, and Maintenance”

Adjudication committee

• Dr. Meghyn Bienvenu, CNRS & LaBRI – University of Bordeaux, France
• Professor Boris Konev, Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, UK
• Dr. Crystal Chang Din, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway

Supervisors: 

• Associate Professor Evgenij Thorstensen, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
• Professor Arild Waaler, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
• Associate Professor Jon Henrik Forssell, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo 

Constructing and maintaining a high-quality ontology are by no means simple tasks; indeed, many of the specification and maintenance tasks are currently performed manually and thus prone to human error. This work provides interfaces to ontologies and ontology-based data access systems that allow for users to see the big picture rather than needing to understand complex logical constructions. It provides a solid theoretical basis for sophisticated ontology design and maintenance, supporting the encoding of design choices that previously were left implicit as well as algorithms for the detection and removal of unwanted redundancies. It provides a data transformation framework that supports automatic, robust handling of exceptions and incomplete data, thus cutting down on manual maintenance tasks. Furthermore, a new formalism for creating ontologies (called OTTR) which supports the definition and instantiation of recurring patterns is introduced. This formalism and its extensions support creating ontologies quickly and in bulk while simultaneously ensuring uniformity of modeling following the Don’t-Repeat-Yourself (DRY) principle.