William Van Woensel

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in Health Informatics and Information Systems at the University of Ottawa. I also hold an Adjunct Faculty position at the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University. Before that, I was a Research Associate and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the NICHE Research Group at Dalhousie University. I was a teaching assistant for 6 years at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, obtaining the degree of Doctor in Sciences in 2013.

Research Interests

My research interests lie at the crossroads of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), Information Systems (IS) engineering, and Mobile Computing. In particular, I am interested in applying these technologies to innovate domains such as healthcare, law, government and business.

Publications

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2011

Elien Paret; William Van Woensel; Sven Casteleyn; Beat Signer; Olga De Troyer

Efficient Querying of Distributed RDF Sources in Mobile Settings based on a Source Index Model Proceedings Article

In: Shakshuki, Elhandi; Younas, Muhammad (Ed.): Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Mobile Web Information Systems, pp. 554–561, Elsevier, Procedia Computer Science, Niagara Falls, Canada, 2011.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Querying Distributed RDF, RDF indexing, SPARQL

@inproceedings{Paret2011,

title = {Efficient Querying of Distributed RDF Sources in Mobile Settings based on a Source Index Model},

author = { Elien Paret and  William Van Woensel and  Sven Casteleyn and  Beat Signer and  Olga De Troyer},

editor = {Shakshuki, Elhandi and Younas, Muhammad},

url = {http://web.cs.dal.ca/~woensel/paper/Efficient Querying of Distributed RDF Sources in Mobile Settings based on a Source Index Model.pdf},

year  = {2011},

date = {2011-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Mobile Web Information Systems},

pages = {554--561},

publisher = {Elsevier, Procedia Computer Science},

address = {Niagara Falls, Canada},

abstract = {Recent technological developments in the area of mobile devices in combination with the ubiquity of mobile connectivity have turned handheld devices into rich mobile web clients. On the other hand, we witness an increased number of web resources that are no longer only available in HTML but also in RDF format. In order to access relevant information in a mobile setting, we often want to query a subset of this large amount of heterogeneous RDF resources based on various context factors. We present a semantic technology-based client-side solution for efficient querying of large sets of distributed RDF sources without query endpoints. Our solution continuously extracts metadata from distributed RDF sources and manages this metadata in a local Source Index Model (SIM). When a new query has to be processed, the SIM is consulted to identify, assemble and query only potentially relevant resources. We do not plan to replace existing mobile query engines, but rather build on them to efficiently and transparently query large sets of distributed online RDF sources. The evaluation of our enhanced query handler reveals significant improvements in the overall query execution time based on the proposed SIM.},

keywords = {Querying Distributed RDF, RDF indexing, SPARQL},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}