KnowledgE ENgineering team

Funded projects - Recent highlights - Members and collaborators

The aim of the team's activities is to contribute computing theory, methods, and techniques to the knowledge society.
The scope of the KEEN team is knowledge engineering in its broad sense. This includes ontology engineering, the Semantic Web, intelligent (logic-based, ontology-driven) conceptual modelling, and natural language generation.

Research projects

  1. MoRe NL: foundations of a Modular Realisation Engine for Nguni Languages, funded by the NRF (2020-2022)
  2. ALMA – Modeling of Knowledge Networks in Medieval Romance Speaking Europe Based on Linguistic Data, led by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, funded by the German Akademienprogramm. Aug 2022 - 2025.
  3. QueST: Querying Smart Text, approved for funding by SADiLaR.
  4. Various funding sources over the past years; mainly: NRF, HPI Research School in Computer Science for Africa (CS4A) at UCT, DOT4D@UCT, ULPDO@UKZN.
  5. Recently completed projects:
    • Teaching material development grant for the "An introduction to Ontology Engineering" textbook, funded by the Digital Open Textbooks for Development project at UCT. Project duration: 2019-2020 (1 year + top-up funding in 2021).
    • Erasmus+ funding on ontologies and machine learning with Poznan University of Technology (2020-2022), where I was supposed to be PI with Agnieszka Lawrynowicz and do exchanges on that topic, but the colonial admin of PUT preferred otherwise.
    • ARISTOTELES: Methodology and algorithms for automatic revision of ontologies in task based scenarios. Funded by the Polish National Science Center (2015-2018) with PI Agnieszka Lawrynowicz.
    • Medical Machine Translation, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, UK. Funded by the EPSRC, UK (2017-2018).
    • GeNi: A Grammar Engine for Nguni natural language Interfaces. Funded by the NRF (2015-2017).
    • Foundations for Nguni natural language generation systems. UCT Science Faculty Launching grant (2014-2017).

Recent highlights

For a full list of papers and related outputs, click here.

Members and collaborators

Leader
Maria Keet

Colleagues
Zola Mahlaza

Postgraduate students
Mary-Jane Antia (PhD; 2019-)
area: ontology engineering, competency questions
Toky Raboanary (PhD; 2019-)
area: ontology engineering
Phutang Makhupane (MSc, 2023-)
topic: ontology engineering
Leighton Dawson (MSc, 2020-)
topic: ODPs
Crystal Yang (M. IT; 2022-)
topic: knowledge management in legal IT
Jacques de Lange (M. IT; 2021-)
topic: NLP with SA English
Kyle Seakgwa (M. IT; 2021-)
topic: knowledge extraction for artificial moral agents

BSc honours (4th-year) students
Undergraduate research project (CSC2005Z)
Scientific programmers and research assistants
Current and recent collaborators
Alumni of the KEEN team (since 2016)