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

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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, and the ontology authoring aspects in particular--including semantics of relations, abstraction, and modularization--the interface with natural language, and on ontology-driven (temporal) 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, and OntoPartS to chose a part-whole relation. I also conduct experiments in ontology engineering, and branched out into natural language generation for isiZulu in particular. Specific subject domains for AI application areas include cell biology, ecology, data mining, and peace research.
Read more about current research and participation/PI in 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

(Dr.ir.drs.) 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 100 peer-reviewed publications at venues including KR, FOIS, K-CAP, EKAW, ESWC, ER, 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 25 Program Committees of international workshops and conferences and reviewed for numerous journals; recently she has been a (PC or local) chair for EKAW2020, FOIS2018, CNL2018, IJCAI 2021 Demo track, and the ISWC2019 outrageous ideas track.
Before her employment at UCT, Maria was Senior lecturer at the School of Computer Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and before that, a non-tenured 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.