Homepage of Ulrike Sattler

I live in Manchester,

where I am a professor in the Information Management Group within the School of Computer Science of the University of Manchester . Before, I have been a member of the very nice group of Franz Baader, the Chair for Automata Theory at the Technical University in Dresden, and many of the following links still point to Dresden.
My address is: School of Computer Science (building 39 on this map), University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK

Office: Room 2.24

Voice (+44-161) 275-6176
Fax (+44-161) 275-6236

sattler@cs.man.ac.uk

My calendar is available online.

Scientific Interests

My general research interests are in logics for knowledge representation and automated deduction. More specifically, I am interested in Description, Modal, and Dynamic Logics, the corresponding inference problems, their complexity, and decision procedures for these problems.

Description Logics are a family of knowledge representation formalisms with several nice properties such as high expressive power, well-defined semantics, decidable inference problems, and practicable inference algorithms for these problems. I work on Description Logics as the logical underpinning of ontology languages such as OWL and OWL 2; their usage, for example, in molecular biology; practical inference algorithms for highly expressive Description Logics; and on the complexity of and inference algorithms for Description, Modal, and Dynamic Logics, using e.g., automata-based and tableau-based techniques.

I maintain a list of DL reasoners.

Announcements and news:

• KR 2010 will take place in Toronto, in May 2010
• there is a site gathering some stuff people are working on around OWL in Manchester
• the Review of Symbolic Logic has been established, and you are cordially invited to submit a paper
• the Journal of Logic and Computation now has a corner on Logic for Ontology Engineering , and you are cordially invited to submit a paper

Publications and talks

A list of my publications is available online, for the technical reports, see the list of technical reports of the Chair for Automata Theorie. The slides of an overview talk I gave in Manchester are also available electronically.

Teaching and Useful Resources

If you consider doing your Ph.D. in logic-based knowledge representation, ontologies, or Description or Modal Logics, and would like to do it within our great, cross-disciplinary IMG group and under my supervision, please have a look at the departmental web page for future Ph.D. students and let me know.

I teach, together with Bijan Parsia and the friendly support of <oXygen/> XML editor, COMP60370 on semi-structured data and the Web; together with Renate Schmidt, COMP60162 on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning; and, together with Carole Goble, the Research Seminar COMP7000.

A very good resource for advice for PhD students by Alan Bundy and some (not so serious) thoughts about how to choose a good topic for a thesis by Serge Abiteboul. There is a useful Referee Guide by Ian Parberry which is not only of interest to all new reviewers, but also to those submitting a paper.

Cooperations and Projects

Ian Horrocks and me are developing practicable inference algorithms for very expressive Description Logics. Some of our algorithms were implemented by Ian in his automated reasoner FaCT and they are being used in various modern DL reasoners.

In the EPSRC project Dynamic Ontologies: a Framework for Services Descriptions, we are extending the logical framework underlying current ontology languages for the description of the dynamic aspects of Semantic Web/e-Science services.

In the EU funded TONES project, we are working with our friends on automated reasoning techniques and methodologies to support ontology engineering.

With Boris Motik and Ullrich Hustadt, we have developed resolution-based decision procedures for expressive DLs, which Boris has implemented successfully in the DL reasoner KAON2.

In the EPSRC project Composing and decomposing ontologies: a logic-based approach, I am working with Thomas Schneider, Ian Horrocks, Bijan Parsia, Dirk Walther, Frank Wolter, and (as a guest star) Carsten Lutz.

I am working with Carsten Lutz on the complexity of Boolean Modal Logics and other logics and, together with, additionally, Lidia Tendera on finite model reasoning.

Other Activities

I am an editor of the Logic for Ontology Engineering corner of the Journal of Logic and Computation, a PC co-chair OWLED 2008 in Karlsruhe, a co-organizer of WORM2008 and a member of the Program Committee of ESWC 2008 ISWC 2008, AAAI 2008, AiML 2008, DL 2008. Activities from previous years are stored elsewhere.

Tutorials

I will give tutorials at the Reasoning Web Summer School 2007 and at the ACIA Summer School 2007. Carsten Lutz and I gave a course on Description Logics at ICCL Summer School 2005: Logic-based Knowledge Representation .

Ian Horrocks and I gave several tutorials: a tutorial on Description Logics at IJCAR 2001 (slides can be found here); a tutorial on Description Logics at ECAI2002; and an introductory course on Logical Foundations for the Semantic Web at ESSLLI2003.

Carsten Lutz and I gave an advanced course on Description Logics at ESSLLI2002, and an introductory course on Description Logics at ESSLLI2004 in Nancy.

Others

The Summer School of the Informatica Feminale is an annual event taking place in Bremen with a broad variety of high quality computer science cources.

For mogul lovers: have a look at the Buckelpistencamp of Tatjana Mittermayer and Enno Thomas!

You can see some photos I took.

and

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