MSc Student Projects 2009
offered by Boris Konev

BK-1: Protege Plugin for Ontology Module Extraction
Second supervisor: Frank Wolter

In computer science, ontologies are used to provide a common vocabulary for a domain of interest together with descriptions of the meaning of terms built from the vocabulary and relationships between them. Ontologies in this sense are increasingly used in knowledge management systems, medical and bio-informatics, and are set to play a key role in the semantic web and grid. In order to be computer-accessible, modern ontologies are formulated in a logic-based ontology language such as OWL. The ontology engineering and maintenance is supported by ontology editors such as Protege.
Healthcare and life science ontologies often tend to be large and complex. In many practical cases, however, only a part of the ontology relevant to an application in hand would suffice. Konev, Lutz, Walter and Wolter developed an algorithm for extracting semantic modules from ontologies formulated in the lightweight fragment of OWL, OWL-EL. A prototype implementation of the algorithm is available.

The purpose of this project is to research into, design, and develop a Protege plugin communicating with the prototype implementation, and presenting the extracted modules to the user. Protege is written in Java, the prototype implementation is written in OCaml. To complete this project, understanding of description logics would be required.

BK-2: Simplified Temporal Resolution for Propositional Linear Time Logic
Second supervisor: Michael Fisher

A. Degtyarev, M. Fisher, and B. Konev suggested a resolution calculus for PLTL which ensures the streamlined use of temporal resolvents. This method, termed 'simplified temporal resolution', was, however, never implemented.
The aim of this project is to implement the simplified calculus using efficient solvers for the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT solvers), which currently became available. This project involves reading and understanding a research paper, developing the code which communicates with an external program written by somebody else, and performance measuring the resulting program against existing provers for this logic.

BK-3: Salutation Extraction for Personalised Bulk Emails
Second supervisor: Alexei Lisitsa

Facing the huge amount of spam, people tend to ignore incoming emails if they are not personalised. Yet it is often necessary to send the same message to a group of people, for example, when organising an event (conference, workshop), activity (discussion group), or in business communication. There are two aims in this project.

1. Technical: to develop a software system capable of making it easier to send personalised emails to a group of people. Such system would contain a database of addresses together with personalised salutations, so it will be possible to write a message text and select recipients, then the system will consult the database and include an appropriate salutation.
2. Research: to develop and implement methods of extracting salutations from existing emails. For example, if Miss No Name starts her email to me as "Hi Boris," and sings it as "Cheers, No", the default salutations should be "Hi No,". If, however, Professor Anon Ymous starts his email with "Dear Dr. Konev" and finishes with "Kind regards, Professor Anon Ymous", the default salutation should be "Dear Professor Ymous".