UNIVERSITAET BREMEN

Universitaet Bremen

University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany. The University of Bremen is participating in OASIS with three research groups drawn from Informatics, the Collaborative Research Center on Spatial Cognition, and Linguistics. These groups have a strong history of interaction and interdisciplinary research, particularly in the areas of formal ontology, ontology-based natural language processing, and spatial ontologies and have substantial experience in national and European cooperative projects. Together around 50 researchers are involved in highly interdisciplinary research ranging from cognitive and social sciences to linguistics, artificial intelligence, and knowledge engineering. The Informatics group has been a leading member of the IFIP Working Group 1.3 standardisation initiative on algebraic methods specification languages and toolsets, resulting in the Common Algebraic Specification Language CASL. CASL is a central component of the Heterogenous Tool Set (Hets) that includes sophisticated structuring mechanisms and connections to a variety of proof engines. The Collaborative Research Center is researching in all areas of spatial representation, and building on extensive experience in qualitative spatial representations, calculi and reasoning. The linguistics group has extensive experience in the design and use of linguistically motivated ontologies for capturing semantic generalizations and integrating application with language technology components. Among the current projects relevant to this proposal are the ontology subprojects of the Collaborative Research Center, ALT INFO (ALgebraic Tools IN Formal Ontology, collaboration and exchange project, funded by the Italian and German academic exchange services), and the EU Project SHARE-it.

Main function / role in OASIS:

UniBremen is the leader of SP1 and WP1.1.
UniBremen brings in its considerable experience in (a) ontological engineering, (b) formal algebraic methods, (c) toolsets for structured algebraic specifications and (d) the application of (b-d) to (a).
UniBremen is a member of the European Centre for Ontological Research (ECOR) and participates in the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) OntoLog community: through these UniBremen will link OASIS ontology activities into diverse areas of the ontology engineering community.
Leader of WP 1.2 “ Development of common ontological framework”.

Acronym:

UniBREMEN

Country:

Germany

Website:

www.uni-bremen.de

Contact:

Prof. John Bateman ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , PhD, University of Edinburgh, 1986) has worked in ontologies since 1989 in research institutes and universities in Britain, Germany, the US and Japan. He has published widely in ontology and computational linguistics and has participated in cooperative research projects in both Europe and the US and founded the Bremen Ontology Research Group to coordinate formal ontology engineering efforts across research projects.

Prof. Bernd Krieg-BrücknerUniversity of Bremen and the German research center for artificial intelligence (DFKI), (Dr.rer.nat, TU München, 1978) has managed several large cooperative projects in the area of software specification, one of which resulted in the Common Algebraic Specification Language, CASL. Recent work centres around the support and verification environment for CASL, extensions to Modal Logic, Description Logic, and ontologies and interrelations with other formal specification languages in a heterogeneous setting.

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