[DL] Research positions available

[Ulrike Sattler]

Three research positions are offered on a collaborative EPSRC
Research Project in Computer Science between the

   University of Liverpool     (Prof. F Wolter),  
   University of  Manchester (Prof. I Horrocks), and  
   King's College London     (Prof. M Zakharyaschev).

Within this project, we will untertake specific research and
development concerning the foundations of service description
languages for the semantic web and grid. Thus, a background in logic,
knowledge representation, and automated reasoning would be desirable.

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A summary of the project:

Current research on Semantic Web/Grid services aims to make web based
services more readily accessible to automated processes. In
particular, it should be possible to automatically discover and use
web/grid based services in order to perform some given task, and
automatically compose multiple services in order to perform more
complex tasks.

Ontologies are set to play a key role in the Semantic Web/Grid by
providing precisely defined vocabulary that can be used to describe
and reason about content of web documents and web services.  To
describe services, however, current web based ontology languages have
several limitations, one of the most serious of which is that they are
inherently "static": they have no means to model changes in the world
that may result from, e.g., performing services.  Extending these
languages in a principled manner will first require an extension of
the underlying logical languages on which they are based, namely
expressive description logics, in order to better describe dynamic
situations. We propose to do this by extending existing description
logics with notions of time (both qualitative and quantitative), and
with the ability to represent and reason about actions.

This will include theoeratical investigations of the properties of
such logics, the development of inference algorithms for key reasoning
problems and the evaluation of their utility in prototypical
implementations.

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So far, the following researchers participate in this project:

  Anatoli Degtyarev (www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/anatoli/)
  Clare Dixon (www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~clare/)
  Carole Goble (www.cs.man.ac.uk/~carole/)
  Ian Horrocks (www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks)
  Agi Kurucz (www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/kuag/)
  Ulrike Sattler (www.cs.man.ac.uk/~sattler)
  Frank Wolter (www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~frank/)
  Micha Zakharyaschev (www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/mz/)

The positions are tenable for three years, with a salary: £18.265 -
£22191 pa (under review), and are available from February 2004.

Informal enquiries about the project and positions are very welcome
and should be addressed to one of the following:

  Uli Sattler (sattler at cs.man.ac.uk) in Manchester or
  Frank Wolter (frank at csc.liv.ac.uk) in Liverpool or
  Michael Zakharyaschev (mz at dcs.kcl.ac.uk) at King's College London.

If you want to apply to one of these positions, you need to follow a
certain formal procedure, which depends on the university:

King's College London, see http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/mz03_2.html
University of Liverpool, see http://uniwww.connect.org.uk/jobs/jb263121.html
University of Manchester, see http://www.man.ac.uk/news/vacancies/research.html#643