Research

I am currently doing a PhD thesis in Computer Science at the LINA (Nantes Atlantic Computer Science Lab), university of Nantes. I am a member of the GDD group headed by Pascal Molli. My director is Philippe Lamarre and my superviser is Sylvie Cazalens.

My topic of research is about semantic information retrieval in distributed systems. I mainly focus on peer-to-peer (P2P) systems in which each peer uses an ontology to represent its data. I am interested in the challenging problem related to the semantic heterogeneity that occurs when all the peers do not use the same ontology. Semantic heterogeneity, which is a particular state of the system, prevents perfect interoperability. My goal is to show that reducing heterogeneity improves interoperability. In order to do that, it is necessary to be able to characterize the semantic heterogeneity of a P2P system. As it is a complex notions, several measures should be defined. After that I plan to propose algorithms to reduce some facets of semantic heterogeneity of a system. The proposed measures should helpful to show how these algorithms are efficient to reduce heterogeneity. Finally I plan to demonstrate (at least experimentally) that reducing semantic heterogeneity allows to improve interoperability.