I'm a Research Scientist in the Protégé project. I research methods to build, maintain, and reason over knowledge bases represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). I coordinate and teach the Protégé Short Course, which covers the OWL language, and building, reasoning, and querying OWL ontologies with Protégé. I also investigate methods to standardize metadata that describe scientific data with ontologies, in an effort to make data findable and reusable. My research interests revolve around artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, and ontology engineering.
I worked in the Protégé and the Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) projects, led by Mark Musen. I developed Protégé extensions that allow users to collaboratively build OWL ontologies using Protégé Desktop. These extensions are used in the development of the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus. In collaboration with industry partners, I developed ontologies used in enterprise knowledge graphs. I also built tools for transforming data from spreadsheets and forms into ontology statements.
I worked on an N8 Consortium project to build an intelligent system for browsing and discovering scientific equipment. This project involved the development of an OWL ontology to describe scientific equipment available within institutions of the N8 Consortium, and a prototype Web application for faceted-browsing of equipment based on the ontology. This project was supervised by Robert Stevens.
I was a Teaching Assistant on the following courses:
In my thesis Impact Analysis in Description Logic Ontologies, I investigated methods to detect and present changes between description logic (DL) ontologies represented in OWL. I defined a new diff method that detects changes to asserted and inferred axioms, as well as changes to the meaning of terms. Then I investigated how axiom changes affect DL reasoner performance. I defined a new method to isolate small ontology subsets whose interaction with the remainder is highly performance-degrading—so called hot spots. I was supervised by Uli Sattler and Bijan Parsia.
I received a Kilburn scholarship. In my Masters dissertation, I investigated the feasibility of collaboratively developing OWL ontologies using semantic wikis. I evaluated semantic wikis equipped with reasoning and SPARQL querying capabilities. This project was supervised by Alan Rector and Robert Stevens.
Completed with 1st class Honours. I received an award for the Best Achievement in the Field of Computational Biology. My final year project was supervised by Frans Coenen.
DBLP and Google Scholar are likely more up to date.
I frequently review papers for multiple conferences and workshops:
I am a member of the editorial board for the Semantic Web Journal. I also review for the following journals:
I grew up in a coastal town in south Portugal, where I spent most of my free time sailing. I became an avid Laser-class sailor and competed around the country and in Spain. More recenty I've taken up surfing, skiing, and scuba diving.
Scuba diving has become my main hobby (I'm a PADI instructor). I've logged over 200 dives, including in the Red Sea in Egypt, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Caribbean Sea, the cenotes in Mexico, the Blue Hole in Belize, and Hawaii. I swam with whale sharks in Honduras, for brief seconds!