This article is from the archives of the UB Reporter.
News

Ceusters awarded visiting professorship

  • The ultimate showman, P.T. Barnum,
proved to be the inspiration for Cynthia Wu’s current book
project. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE

    Werner Ceusters
By SUE WUETCHER
Published: February 24, 2010

UB faculty member Werner Ceusters will visit the country where he was born and where he began his academic career when he delivers five lectures in May as part of a distinguished visiting professorship at the University of Brussels (VUB), Belgium.

Ceusters, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and director of the Ontology Research Group in UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, will present lectures organized around the theme of “Ontology for Ontologies: Theory and Applications.”

The weeklong lecture series is designed to provide an in-depth understanding of what the disciplines of realism-based ontology and knowledge representation have to offer each other and how a joint approach “can leverage semantic interoperability in a variety of domains.”

Ceusters says that in addition to lecturing, he will be exploring further possibilities for collaboration with the Department of Computer Science at VUB and to identify European and other international research projects UB’s Ontology Research Group could participate in. Faculty from the group now are part of two such projects, which offer additional sources of research funding at a time when such funding can be difficult to obtain in the U.S.

Ontology is both a branch of philosophy and a fast-growing component of computer science concerned with developing a common system of categories that can be re-used in different contexts. It provides foundations for diverse technologies in such areas as information integration, natural language processing, data annotation and the construction of intelligent computer systems and their applications across many disciplines.

Biomedical ontologists attempt to devise systems of communication in which there is a consistent meaning for terms used in different language systems and conceptual frameworks.

The awarding of the Brussels professorship to Ceusters “strengthens the recognition of UB's Ontology Research Group as one of the thought leaders in matters of formal ontology,” he says.

He explains that computer scientists and philosophers look at the field of ontology in different ways. “For computer scientists, it is first a matter of how to organize knowledge in such a way that a computer can reason consistently and efficiently with it for a specific purpose,” he says. “For UB’s Ontology Research Group, the emphasis is on building representations that are faithful to reality and independent of any specific purpose. Ontology engineers are happy ‘when it works,’ in contrast to philosophical ontologists, who are only happy ‘when it is right.’ This (differing outlook) quite often raises serious tensions,” he says.

VUB is a leading institution in the “software engineering approach” to ontology, Ceusters notes, so “having selected somebody (Ceusters) from 'the other camp' is indeed significant.”

Ceusters joined the UB faculty in 2006 after serving as executive director of the European Center for Ontological Research at Saarland University, Germany.

His research focuses on the application of referent tracking for data management and the requirements of ontologies and terminologies to be useful for annotation under this framework.

He received an MD in medicine, surgery and obstetrics from the State University of Ghent, Belgium; an MSc in informatics and software engineering from the Technical University of Ghent; and a postgraduate degree in knowledge engineering from the Babbage Institute for Knowledge and Information Technology, State University of Ghent.