Boris Motik
Professor Boris Motik
Room 308, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD
Themes:
Interests
I am interested in developing algorithms and techniques necessary for realizing advanced applications in the Semantic Web. In the past, my research is focused around the ontology language OWL. More recently, I became interested in applying ontology techniques to data management problems in databases and big data. Specifically, I am investigating ways in using variants of datalog — a language at the intersection of logic programming and databases — to represent and access data, and I am studying the related theoretical and practical problems, such as efficient evaluation of datalog programs and efficient maintenance of datalog materialisations. My research involves the development of tools that demonstrates the techniques I am working on.
- In my PhD, I developed algorithms for reasoning in OWL by reusing database technologies. I implemented these techniques in the KAON2 reasoner. The German company ontoprise GmbH is currently using KAON2 in a commercial setting.
- In my postdoc research I have developed the HermiT reasoner. This reasoner is based on a novel reasoning algorithm based on hypertableau, which allows HermiT to process certain ontologies that have traditionally been quite "hard".
- Recently, I have been working on a new reasoner for datalog and RDF called RDFox. The system aims to exploit the modern computer architectures and use the available memory and the computational cores efficiently.
Publications
complete list with downloadable papers
Biography
Before coming to Oxford, I worked in the Information Management Group, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester. I got my PhD from the University of Karlsruhe under supervision of Prof. Rudi Studer. While in Karlsruhe, Germany, I was employed at the Research Center for Information Technologies (FZI). I speak English, German, and Croatian, so feel free to send me e-mails in any of these languages.
Awards
- The 2013 Roger Needham award by the British Computer Society (BCS) for "a distinguished research contribution in computer science"
- Selected as one of "2008 AI's 10 to Watch" by the IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine
- The 2007 Cor Baayen award by the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) for "a most promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics"
- Best Paper at the 2005 International Semantic Web Conference for my paper "On the Properties of Metamodeling in OWL"
Technology Transfer Projects with Industry Partners
- I am collaborating with Oracle on developing methods for efficient management of large-scale graph data.
- With Armasuisse I am working on using ontologies to detect events from Twitter streams.
- With EDF I am working on an ontology-based recommender system helping customers save energy.
- For Samsung, I am developing a lightweight ontology-based data store that can support intelligent applications on mobile devices.
- For ExperienceOn, a start-up in Barcelona, Spain, I am developing an ontology-based data store that is powering their multilingual Fogg search engine.
