Post-doctoral position

Ontology alignment service infrastructure for the semantic web, peer-to-peer networks, web services and agents

The semantic web relies on the expression of formalized knowledge on the web (in languages like RDF). Like the web, the semantic web will have to be distributed and heterogeneous. As such, the integration of resources found on the semantic web is one of its main problems. For contributing solving this problem, data is expressed in the framework of ontologies (theories describing the vocabulary used for expressing data). However, ontologies themselves can be heterogeneous and some work has to be done to achieve interoperability: the problem is only lifted at the ontology level.

Reconciling ontologies is achieved by finding the correspondences between ontologies (called alignments). Finding these alignments is only the first step of the process. Very often these alignments have to be evaluated, improved and finally transformed into some executable procedure before being used by applications: transforming some ontology in order to integrate it with another one, generating a set of bridge axioms that will help identify corresponding concepts, translating messages sent from one agent to another, translating data circulating among heterogeneous web services, mediating queries and answers in peer-to-peer systems and federated databases.

We wish to design and implement a "universal" alignment service and infrastructure for the semantic web that can be used for agent communication, context matching, peer-to-peer querying and networked ontologies. This requires the ability to interact in each of these contexts with the appropriate language (exchanging messages for agents, being a service for web services). This also requires providing in each context the procedure that applies.

Such an alignment service will need to embed alignment storage and communication means with all kinds of applications. It will also require investigating a number of open issues such as:

A postdoctoral position is available at INRIA Rhône-Alpes. The successful candidate will have to research, design and develop deeper this infrastructure.

This work will be based on the one already carried in the Knowledge web network of excellence on semantic web service communication, agent negotiation protocol as well as in our team on alignment algorithms. It will also take advantage of the already developed Alignment API. This will require cooperation with researchers involved in European (Knwoledge web, NeOn) and National (WebContent) projects.

References:

Qualification: PhD or equivalent in computer science. Knowledge in knowledge representation, P2P, web services, or agent communication is welcome.

Researched skills:

Hiring date: as soon as possible.

Place of work: The position is located at INRIA Rhône-Alpes, Montbonnot (near Grenoble, France) a main computer science research lab, in a stimulating research environment. Research will be carried out in the Exmo team under the supervision of Jérôme Euzenat. It will require the involvement of the candidate in related projects.

Duration: 12 months (extendible to longer period)

Salary: 2150 EUR/month

Contact: For further information, contact Jerome:Euzenat#inrialpes:fr. File: Provide Vitæ, motivation letter and references.

INRIA Priority research themes:


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