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. KeBoNa: Knowledge-driven bootstrapping of computational language resources for Niger-Congo B languages, CPRR grant funded by the National Research Foundation. (2024-2026)
  2. Partner lab in the ReproHum Project, Investigating Reproducibility of Human Evaluations in NLP, led by Anya Belz as Principal Investigator (ADAPT Research Centre, Dublin City University; University of Aberdeen). Funded by EPSRC UK. 2022-2024.
  3. Exchanges in the project STormwAteR and WastewAteR networkS heterogeneous data AI-driven management (STARWARS), funded under European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the MSCA (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions)-SE (Staff Exchanges). 2023-2026.
  4. 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.
  5. QueST: Querying Smart Text, approved for funding by SADiLaR.
  6. Various funding sources over the past years; mainly: NRF, HPI Research School in Computer Science for Africa (CS4A) at UCT, DOT4D@UCT, ULPDO@UKZN.
  7. Recently completed projects:

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-based question generation
Tadiwa Magwenzi (MSc, 2024-)
topic: TBD
Phuthang Makhupane (MSc, 2023-)
topic: bootstrapping for ontology verbalization
Claudious Nhemwa (MSc, 2023-)
topic: TBA
Leighton Dawson (MSc, 2020-)
topic: ODPs
Crystal Yang (M. IT; 2022-)
topic: knowledge management in legal IT
Jacques de Lange (M. IT; 2021-submitted)
topic: NLP with SA English
Kyle Seakgwa (M. IT; 2021-submitted)
topic: knowledge extraction for artificial moral agents

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