Honorary Mention for Fouad Zablith at ESWC's PhD Symposium

From NeOn Project

KMi PhD student Fouad Zablith has been awarded a honorary mention for his paper entitled "Evolva: A Comprehensive Approach to Ontology Evolution", at the PhD Symposium held during the 2009 European Semantic Web Conference. This year's symposium, which took place in Heraklion, Crete, was extremely competitive: out of 31 submissions only 8 were accepted as full papers and the three winners were selected from these papers.

Fouad's research focuses on ontology evolution in the context of the Semantic Web. At the symposium he had the opportunity to discuss his progress with mentors, who were selectively assigned to ask critical questions and provide feedback. Fouad's work is supervised by Marta Sabou, Enrico Motta and Mathieu d'Aquin and his objective is to make the tedious process of ontology evolution easier for end-users. To this purpose he is working on an ontology evolution framework which covers the complete ontology evolution lifecycle and, by exploiting a variety of sources of background knowledge, is able to modify an ontology with relatively little input from users. During his presentation Fouad also demo-ed Evolva, an ontology evolution tool which provides an initial implementation of the approach.

With around 30 participants, and a 100% attendance by PhD students, this year's PhD Symposium was a pastedgraphicsuccess. Each presentation was followed by constructive discussions, and many students have commented on the friendly nature of the event. This, they said, motivated them in further pursuing research in the Semantic Web area. The standard of the presentations was very high and, as a result, it was very difficult to decide the winner of the "Best PhD Student" award. Therefore, besides the main award being given to Christian Meilicke, the mentors decided to also award two honorary mentions to Fouad Zablith and Carola Carstens. All three prizes were awarded from a contribution provided by NeOn.

Story By: Fouad Zablith & Marta Sabou