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
2018
William Van Woensel; Syed Sibte Raza Abidi
Benchmarking Semantic Reasoning on Mobile Platforms: Towards Optimization Using OWL2 RL Journal Article
In: Semantic Web Journal, 2018.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Mobile Computing, OWL2 RL, Semantic Web reasoning
@article{SWJ-WVW-2018,
title = {Benchmarking Semantic Reasoning on Mobile Platforms: Towards Optimization Using OWL2 RL},
author = {William Van Woensel and Syed Sibte Raza Abidi},
url = {http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/system/files/swj1881.pdf},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-08-06},
journal = {Semantic Web Journal},
abstract = {Mobile hardware has advanced to a point where apps may consume the Semantic Web of Data, as exemplified in domains such as mobile context-awareness, m-Health, m-Tourism and augmented reality. However, recent work shows that the performance of ontology-based reasoning, an essential Semantic Web building block, still leaves much to be desired on mobile platforms. This presents a clear need to provide developers with the ability to benchmark mobile reasoning performance, based on their particular application scenarios, i.e., including reasoning tasks, process flows and datasets, to establish the feasibility of mobile deployment. In this regard, we present a mobile benchmark framework called MobiBench to help developers to benchmark semantic reasoners on mobile platforms. To realize efficient mobile, ontology-based reasoning, OWL2 RL is a promising solution since it (a) trades expressivity for scalability, which is important on resource-constrained platforms; and (b) provides unique opportunities for optimization due to its rule-based axiomatization. In this vein, we propose selections of OWL2 RL rule subsets for optimization purposes, based on several orthogonal dimensions. We extended MobiBench to support OWL2 RL and the proposed ruleset selections, and benchmarked multiple OWL2 RL-enabled rule engines and OWL reasoners on a mobile platform. Our results show significant performance improvements by applying OWL2 RL rule subsets, allowing performant reasoning for small datasets on mobile systems.},
keywords = {Mobile Computing, OWL2 RL, Semantic Web reasoning},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
Mobile hardware has advanced to a point where apps may consume the Semantic Web of Data, as exemplified in domains such as mobile context-awareness, m-Health, m-Tourism and augmented reality. However, recent work shows that the performance of ontology-based reasoning, an essential Semantic Web building block, still leaves much to be desired on mobile platforms. This presents a clear need to provide developers with the ability to benchmark mobile reasoning performance, based on their particular application scenarios, i.e., including reasoning tasks, process flows and datasets, to establish the feasibility of mobile deployment. In this regard, we present a mobile benchmark framework called MobiBench to help developers to benchmark semantic reasoners on mobile platforms. To realize efficient mobile, ontology-based reasoning, OWL2 RL is a promising solution since it (a) trades expressivity for scalability, which is important on resource-constrained platforms; and (b) provides unique opportunities for optimization due to its rule-based axiomatization. In this vein, we propose selections of OWL2 RL rule subsets for optimization purposes, based on several orthogonal dimensions. We extended MobiBench to support OWL2 RL and the proposed ruleset selections, and benchmarked multiple OWL2 RL-enabled rule engines and OWL reasoners on a mobile platform. Our results show significant performance improvements by applying OWL2 RL rule subsets, allowing performant reasoning for small datasets on mobile systems.
William Van Woensel; Syed Sibte Raza Abidi
Optimizing Semantic Reasoning on Memory-Constrained Platforms using the RETE Algorithm Proceedings Article
In: 15th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2018), pp. 682-696, Springer LNCS, Heraklion, Greece, 2018.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Mobile Computing, OWL2 RL, RETE, Semantic Web reasoning
@inproceedings{ESWC-WVW-2018,
title = {Optimizing Semantic Reasoning on Memory-Constrained Platforms using the RETE Algorithm},
author = {William Van Woensel and Syed Sibte Raza Abidi},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-93417-4_44},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-06-07},
booktitle = {15th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2018)},
pages = {682-696},
publisher = {Springer LNCS},
address = {Heraklion, Greece},
abstract = {Mobile hardware improvements have opened the door for deploying rule systems on ubiquitous, mobile platforms. By executing rule-based tasks locally, less re-mote (cloud) resources are needed, bandwidth usage is reduced, and local, time-sensitive tasks are no longer influenced by network conditions. Further, with data being increasingly published in semantic format, an opportunity arises for rule systems to leverage the embedded semantics of semantic, ontology-based data. To support this kind of ontology-based reasoning in rule systems, rule-based axiomatizations of ontology semantics can be utilized (e.g., OWL 2 RL). Nonetheless, recent benchmarks have found that any kind of ontology-based reasoning on mobile platforms still lacks scalability, at least when directly re-using existing (PC- or server-based) technologies. To create a tailored solution for resource-constrained platforms, we propose changes to RETE, the mainstay algorithm for production rule systems. In particular, we present an adapted algorithm that, by selectively pooling RETE memories, aims to better balance memory usage with performance. Further, we show that this algorithm is well-suited towards many typical Semantic Web scenarios. Using our custom algorithm, we perform an extensive evaluation of semantic reasoning both on the PC and mobile platform.},
keywords = {Mobile Computing, OWL2 RL, RETE, Semantic Web reasoning},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Mobile hardware improvements have opened the door for deploying rule systems on ubiquitous, mobile platforms. By executing rule-based tasks locally, less re-mote (cloud) resources are needed, bandwidth usage is reduced, and local, time-sensitive tasks are no longer influenced by network conditions. Further, with data being increasingly published in semantic format, an opportunity arises for rule systems to leverage the embedded semantics of semantic, ontology-based data. To support this kind of ontology-based reasoning in rule systems, rule-based axiomatizations of ontology semantics can be utilized (e.g., OWL 2 RL). Nonetheless, recent benchmarks have found that any kind of ontology-based reasoning on mobile platforms still lacks scalability, at least when directly re-using existing (PC- or server-based) technologies. To create a tailored solution for resource-constrained platforms, we propose changes to RETE, the mainstay algorithm for production rule systems. In particular, we present an adapted algorithm that, by selectively pooling RETE memories, aims to better balance memory usage with performance. Further, we show that this algorithm is well-suited towards many typical Semantic Web scenarios. Using our custom algorithm, we perform an extensive evaluation of semantic reasoning both on the PC and mobile platform.