Key research themes
1. How can ontologies guide the extraction and structuring of information from unstructured text?
This research area focuses on leveraging domain ontologies to improve the precision and semantic richness of information extraction from unstructured text. By linking extracted data to ontology concepts and relationships, it enables structured semantic representations such as RDF triples, which facilitate enhanced querying and integration with semantic web technologies. This theme matters because it bridges the gap between raw textual data and machine-processable structured knowledge, empowering applications like semantic search, question answering, and knowledge graph construction in specific domains.
2. What are effective methods for modeling, visualizing, and authoring unstructured and semantic content to enhance usability and exploration?
This theme investigates interfaces and models that integrate unstructured content with underlying semantic representations to enable richer exploration, editing, and understanding. By formalizing mappings between semantic elements and user interface components, these approaches make semantic data more accessible and usable by domain experts and end-users, facilitating personalized views, annotation, and improved interaction with heterogeneous content forms. This line of research is crucial for closing the gap between raw unstructured information and its meaningful use in applications.
3. How can multidimensional modeling be adapted to represent and analyze unstructured XML documents combining semantic and structural aspects?
This research explores extensions and new models of multidimensional data warehousing to capture the complex structure and semantics of XML documents and textual data. By integrating semantic hierarchies as special dimensions and relaxing classical constraints like dimension orthogonality, such models enable advanced OLAP analysis over document collections, supporting navigation across both structural and semantic levels. This approach enhances the analytical capability on semi-structured and unstructured information, allowing decision-makers to discover insights grounded in document content and context.