I am a full professor of the French Universities. I got my PhD from the University of Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris,
France) in 1987. After
working first at the University of Pierre et Marie Curie, then at the University of Burgundy (Dijon, France), I am
actually on leave from the French Universities and working at the
University of Lausanne (UNIL), Switzerland. For the time being I am a project leader and lecturer at the Information Systems Institute (ISI) of the University of Lausanne.
Research activities
My main research interests are databases, conceptual modeling, integration, spatio-temporal features, and ontologies.
I have been deeply involved in the development of an extended entity relationship model (ERC) and of associated data manipulation languages: an algebra and a calculus as basic languages, a SQL-like language for user interface, and a deductive language that provided inference capabilities. In 1995 I extended my work on data models and data manipulation languages to geographic and temporal databases. The output is a new spatio-temporal data model (MADS) that supports multiple representations, with its associated data manipulation languages: an algebra for the foundation and a visual query language for the user interface. The data model MADS was at the core of a European IST project, MurMur (2000-2002) on spatio-temporal databases with multiple representations. All this work has been done in collaboration with prof. Stefano Spaccapietra, head of the database lab at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland).
Since 1990, I have been also working on a cooperative design methodology relying on the integration of existing heterogeneous data sources, classic databases or geographic data sets.
Recently I have been expanding my research area to the domain of ontology with a double goal: 1/ offering a more user friendly, more conceptual, interface to logic languages for ontology (in particular for description logics), 2/ adding to conceptual models new inference capabilities, similar to those supported by description logics. One important benefit of this latter goal would be the management of incomplete information based on an ontological paradigm.
Ongoing projects
For the time being I am participating in the European IST project (DIP) and the European network of excellence (KnowledgeWeb) that both deal with ontologies and semantic web services. In the latter, we are working on defining what an ontology modularization approach is.
I am also involved in the INTEROP European network of excellence that aims at enabling interoperability for enterprise applications and software. In this last project, together with Dr. Alexander Osterwalder and prof. Yves Pigneur, we have defined an ontology of business models in two different meta models: in the MADS conceptual data model and in OWL. I am also working with prof. Alessandro Artale of the University of Bolzano (Italy) and Stefano Spaccapietra on a formal definition of the semantics of temporal features for databases and ontologies.
