The next Februery, 9th at 10:00 Valentina Tamma will give the talk "Anytime ontology alignment in opportunistic environments" at room H1003 of block 1 at Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Informáticos (ETSII) of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM).

Here is the talk abstract: "The problem of translating or mapping one schema / ontology in another one has received wide attention in the area of ontology engineering, and many alignment approaches exist. However, these approaches make strong constraints on the availability of knowledge and are usually performed offline, prior to any form of interaction, and often in a centralised fashion.
Less attention has been given to the problem of aligning ontologies on an anytime basis, where only the necessary knowledge is translated and exchanged, and possibly taking into account the preferences of the parties involved. This problem is particularly relevant in situation where partial disclosure of the ontological knowledge is desirable, either because part of the ontologies represent proprietary or commercially sensitive knowledge, or in order to focus the alignment process only on the entities that are essential in order to satisfy a query.

This talk introduces the notion of anytime alignment that can be applied both to the problem of alignment generation and alignment aggregation.  It identifies a number of issues related to determining an alignment through a collaborative decentralised process during opportunistic interactions, that do not presuppose the full disclosure of the relevant ontologies and / or correspondences previously used. Furthermore, we explore issues of: 1) optimality of the solutions when determining an injective alignment; and 2) the use of approximations to determine suitable sub-optimal solutions that satisfy certain conditions and, most importantly, do not violate the consistency and conservativity properties of the ontologies."

Dr Valentina Tamma works in the Robotics & Autonomous Systems and in the KR group, within the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests lie in ontology engineering within open, dynamic environments, and in particular her research has focussed on the design, development and application of ontologies for modelling knowledge in opportunistic environments. Much of her research in recent years has focussed on the problem of aligning ontologies dynamically and under specific conditions, e.g. partial knowledge disclosure.

She has authored several conference papers and journal articles on the subject, and she has been involved in the organisation of a number of relevant events, such as ESWC 2005, the AAAI 05 symposium on agents and the semantic web, and the ISWC 2004 and ECAI 06 workshops on semantic web technology for mobile and ubiquitous applications. She is a member of the Ontology OWL: Experiences and Directions (OWLED) Workshop Steering committee, and she served as Programme chair (OWLED 2014) and General Chair (OWLED 2015) of the OWLED workshop. Dr Tamma served on several  Programme Committees for various Artificial Intelligence, Agents and Semantic Web Conferences and she has been principal and co investigator in several EU and UK funded projects.