Job opening, Semantic data models, UK

[Norman Gray]

Folks,

This is a pre-announcement of a partly CompSci job in Glasgow, UK,  
which I'm associated with.  The post is mostly aimed at CS people  
with an interest in applications, but Astro developers with  
theoretical tendencies would be very welcome also!  I hope it isn't  
deemed an abuse of the list to post it here.

Norman





Initial applications are invited for two positions at the
Department of Computing Science of the University of Glasgow,
for the EPSRC funded project:

Explicator: Intelligent access to foreign data models

The Virtual Observatory (VO) project within astronomy has two
core problems: how to find data from scattered, and often
under-resourced, archives, and once it is found how to make
use of it, given that different archives will generally have
significantly different models of how their data is
structured.  The High-Energy Physics (HEP) community doesn't
really have the first problem -- there are rather fewer
important accelerators and detectors, and so fewer data
sources -- but does have the second, since different
facilities have different, and necessarily inflexible, ideas
about how to structure the data they produce.

An obvious approach is to define a consensus model, but
this can fall victim to the usual social problems of
standardisation.  This project will explore a radically different
peer-to-peer approach, making it possible for software to
extract the information it needs from a network of
explanations.  This approach recognises that partial and
indirect understanding of a dataset's structure can, in
important cases, be enough for the software to do its work.

This approach builds on both well-established Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and Knowledge Engineering (KE) work, as
well as on the emerging technologies from the Semantic Web
community.  It separately builds on work from the Information
Retrieval (IR) community on how to work with distributed,
heterogeneous and uncertain data. The work will extend the
successful TERRIER information retrieval platform
(http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/terrier) and its corresponding
tools, developed at the University of Glasgow, with semantic
web tools and techniques.

This project is a collaboration between the Information
Retrieval group in Glasgow's department of Computing Science,
the X-Ray and Observational Astronomy group within
Leicester's department of Physics and Astronomy, and the
Experimental Particle Physics group in Glasgow's department
of Physics and Astronomy.

Applicants should have a good first degree in Computer
Science or Physical Science, and preferably a PhD and
research experience in fields related to the project topic
such as Artificial Intelligence, Information Extraction,
Information Retrieval, Semantic Web/Mapping/Technologies or
related subjects.

Informal enquiries to:
Dr Iadh Ounis (CS, Glasgow)
     tel: +44 (0)141 330 5652 or ounis at dcs.gla.ac.uk,
Dr Norman Gray (P&A, Leicester)
     norman at astro.gla.ac.uk
Dr Paul Millar (GriddPP and Glasgow)
     p.millar at physics.gla.ac.uk

Starting date: early January 2007 or soon thereafter.

Salary details are to be confirmed, but we anticipate employing
successful candidates on grade 7 of the University's salary scales:
£25,633 -£34,488 per annum






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Norman Gray  /  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  /  University of Leicester, UK