Anne Cregan

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group,
National ICT Australia
and
Dept of Artificial Intelligence
School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia

Telephone: +61 2 9385 6913
Facsimile: +61 2 9385 4936
Email: annec@cse.unsw.edu.au
WWW: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~annec/

Since you may never see me in a dress on any other occasion, (unless I get married I guess), here is a picture of me as a bridesmaid for my brothers wedding in October 2005.

I am a PhD Student with the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group of the Artificial Intelligence Lab in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales.

I am also sponsored by the Centre of Excellence for National Information and Communication Technologies Australia (NICTA).

My supervisor is Professor Norman Foo, and my co-supervisor is Dr Maurice Pagnucco.

Before I became a PhD student, I had a fairly industrious career, which you can read about here: Anne's career.

Research Interests

My main current research interests are:

Ontologies
Semantics
Semantic Web Technologies

Science of Definition

Here is a paper I wrote for AOW05 entitled Towards a Science of Definition (pdf file).

and the corresponding presentation Towards a Science of Definition (powerpoint presentation).

AOW05 is the inaugural Australasian Ontology Workshop to be held in Sydney on December 6, 2005.

Topic Maps and OWL

Recently, I have been working on a method for building Topic Maps as OWL-DL ontologies. So far, there are two papers of interest:

(May 05) Original Proposal to ISO SC34WG3 Building Topic Maps in OWL DL Draft Proposal May 2005An OWL DL construction for the ISO Topic Map Data Model which outlines the proposed method and construction, but does not deal with all the fiddly bits.
(August 05) Extreme Markup Paper Building Topic Maps in OWL-DL which deals with some of the trickier parts of the construction and discusses some outstanding issues. There's also a presentation which goes with this paper here.

I've also built the proposed Topic Map TMDM ontology in OWL using Protege 3.1. You can download it and let me know what you think. Because of the outstanding issues, there are a few variations available - let me explain.

If you have read my August 05 paper you will know that there is a question mark (as I see it) over how the Topic Map "SuperType-SubType" and "Type-Instance" Associations are represented.

This file is based on the Topic Map Data Model NOT including "SuperType-SubType" and "Type-Instance" Associations:

The next two files add "SuperType-SubType" and "Type-Instance" Associations to the TMDM ontology above. It is a full representation of the TMDM, but the functionality required (transitivity of SuperType-SubType and inheritance of instances by SuperTypes) is not taken care of by this model - this requires extra processing.

Lastly, I am working on another variation which gives a more natural representation of the required Topic Map functionality in OWL without adhering to the letter of the TMDM. It will be posted here soon!

To run these, you need to use Protege 3.1 in combination with a reasoner such as RACER. Go to the Protege WebSite for details.

Please send any feedback you have to me via email.

Previous Academic Life

Here is a paper I co-wrote in my previous life as a Psychology Honours Student: Qualitative and Quantitative Properties of an Intelligence Test (pdf file).