Maria Keet
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Cape Town
Cape Town
South Africa
Tel: (+27) 021 650 2667
Fax: (+27) 021 650 3551
Home: www.meteck.org
Blog: keet blog
email: mkeet at cs.uct.ac.za
linkedIn

CV, short bio, publications, and my Google Scholar profile

***If you ended up on this page, but are not interested in my work, then choose Other topics, where there is information on Escher, book reviews, some photos and other not-quite-random themes.***

 

Research interests

Knowledge Engineering -- See als the KnowledgE ENgineering (KEEN) Team webpage
   - Ontology Engineering (foundations, methods, tools)
   - Relations in ontologies, such as their foundations, parthood and other part-whole relations
   - Conceptual modelling & ontology languages (Description Logics, OWL, Object-Role Modeling, etc.)
   - Natural language generation
   - Logic-based knowledge representation

Brief outline research projects
I am currently working mainly on various aspects of ontology engineering, on ontologies' interface with natural language, and on ontology-driven conceptual data modelling. In addition to theoretical foundations of topics in ontology engineering, methods such as FORZA and DiDOn, I lead or am involved in application development of some of the ontology engineering methods, such as TDDonto for test-driven development, ONSET for foundational ontology selection and explanation, the BFO Classifier to align ontologies to BFO, and OntoPartS to chose a part-whole relation, including conducting experiments. Specific subject domains for AI application areas include, among others, cell biology, ecology, and data mining.
Read more about current research and funded projects and/or check the Publications page for concrete results.

 

Teaching (in 2023)

previous years and courses and current and previous postgraduate and honours students




Short bio

C. Maria Keet (PhD, MSc, MA, BSc(hons)) is an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town. She focuses on logic-based knowledge representation, ontologies, conceptual data modelling, and their interaction with natural language tools, which has resulted in over 150 peer-reviewed publications at venues including FOIS, K-CAP, EKAW, ESWC, ER, KR, CIKM, Applied Ontology, Data and Knowledge Engineering, and the Semantic Web Journal. She is, and was, PI on two NRF-funded (CPRR-grant) projects on a grammar engine for Nguni languages, and was PI on an DST/MINCyT-funded bi-lateral project with Argentina on ontology-driven conceptual modelling. She was involved in the EU FET FP6 TONES, EU IRSES FP7 Net2, and EU FP7 e-Lico projects, coordinated the development of several tools, and has served in over 70 Program Committees of international conferences and workshops, and reviewed for numerous journals; recently she has been a PC Chair for INLG2023, ISWC2022 Resources Track, IJCAI2021 Demos Track, and EKAW2020, and she's an editorial board member of Applied Ontology. She has over 15 years of teaching and teaching administration experience, from small to very large classes and both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, she supervised numerous postgraduate students to graduation, and she wrote an award-winning textbook on ontology engineering.
Before her employment at UCT, Maria was Senior lecturer at the School of Computer Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and before that, an Assistant Professor (ricercatore a tempo determinato) at the KRDB Research Centre, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. She obtained a PhD in Computer Science at the KRDB Research Centre in 2008, following a BSc(honours) 1st class in IT & Computing from the Open University UK in 2004, and 3.5 years work experience as systems engineer in the IT industry with its vocational training (MSCE, ASE, ITIL). In addition to computer science, she obtained an MSc in Food Science (Microbiology) from Wageningen University and Research Centre, the Netherlands, in 1998, and an MA 1st class in Peace & Development Studies from the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2003.