I am a Senior Researcher at the Vienna University of Technology (TUWien), in the Christian Doppler Laboratory „Software Engineering Integration for Flexible Automation Systems“ (CDL-Flex), where I lead a module on “Semantic Representation and Integration“. Prior to this, I was an Assistant Professor at the MODUL University Vienna and a Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute, Open University. I hold a PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, for which I received the IEEE Intelligent System’s Ten to Watch Award (2006).
My research focuses on novel methods for acquiring formally represented knowledge and for making use of this knowledge to build intelligent systems, thus contributing to the emerging fields of Data and Web Science. I’m interested in applying knowledge acquisition methods on diverse types of data ranging from structured sources (e.g., ontologies, databases) to weakly structured data sources (text, Web2.0 taxonomies) and finally to attempt the acquisition of tacit knowledge. I make use of a range of methods based on natural language processing, knowledge re-use and most recently human computation. I use ontologies and Semantic Web/Linked Data technologies for representing the acquired knowledge. Therefore I also investigated a suite of ontology engineering topics (learning, evolving, mapping, modularizing, evaluating ontologies). I evaluated the extracted knowledge by creating various systems that provide intelligent behaviour (question answering, semantic search, data analytics, decision making or defect detection) in application areas as diverse as tourism, e-government, and most recently, industrial mechatronic engineering (Industrie4.0).
