Scalable Reasoning in the Semantic Web

Speaker: Jeff Pan

Affiliation: University of Aberdeen

Time: Friday 08/07/2011 from 11:00 to 12:00

Venue: Access Grid UWS. Presented from Penrith (Y239), accessible from Parramatta (EB.1.32) and Campbelltown (26.1.50).

Abstract: In order to implement the Semantic Web vision, the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) has a few standards that are related to reasoning,
including RDF, OWL and SPARQL. Indeed, tractable reasoning over ontologies
is one of the most useful and important services to support Semantic Web
applications. The talk will begin with an introduction of the above
standards, with examples to illustrate why they are needed for linked data
and semantic web applications. As OWL plays a key role in Semantic Web
reasoning, I will then introduce the new OWL2 standard and how to perform
tractable reasoning in OWL2, by exploiting its tractable sub-languages
such as OWL2-EL and OWL2-QL, as well as faithful approximate reasoning
built on top of these sub-languages. If time allows, I could give a
short demostration of our TrOWL (Tractable reasoning for OWL2) reasoning
infrastructure. I will conclude the talk with discussions on some of our
relevant recent work and future steps.

Biography: Jeff Z. Pan received his Ph.D. in computer science from The University of Manchester in 2004, advised by Prof. Ian Horrocks on the topic of Description Logics: Reasoning Support for the Semantic Web. He joined the faculty in the Department of Computing Science at University of Aberdeen in 2005. He is now the coordinator of the Knowledge Technology Group and the Deputy Director of Research of the department. His research focuses primarily on knowledge representation and reasoning, in particular scalable ontology reasoning, querying and reuse, and their applications (such as Semantic Web, Advertising, Healthcare, Software Engineering and Multimedia). He is a key contributor to the W3C OWL2 standard. He leads the work of the TrOWL Tractable OWL2 reasoning infrastructure. He is widely recognised for his work on scalable and efficient ontology reasoning; he gave tutorials on this topic in e.g. AAAI2010, ESWC2010, ESWC2011, SemTech2011 and the Reasoning Web Summer School (2010 and 2011).