Jamel is a Postdoctoral researcher at IXIASOFT, a specialist in the content management software industry. He has finished his Ph.D. on computer science in November 2014 which is supervised by Pr. Guy Lapalme from January 2011. He was a member of RALI (Applied Research in Computational Linguistics) Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science and Operational Research (DIRO) at the Université de Montréal (UdeM).

Thesis description

My research topics are related to document engineering using Semantic Web techniques. The electronic exchange of documents is the mechanism of communication between remote applications which describes the exchange and the information shared in a business process. Document engineering is a discipline to model and structure these business documents by using several standards and languages. In our thesis, we present the document exchange problems and the need for methods for document engineering. Document engineering approach aims at an efficient information sharing. Through a generic exchange model between business partners. XML based is an effective solution for document structure. RosettaNet, cXML, xCBL and ebXML were documents engineering solutions using XML language to deal with the limits of traditional exchange standards. Their major limitation dealing with the semantics in documents, information finding and interpreting their relations. It is used to structure exchanged documents, but does not deal with the semantics of data. Semantic web based document engineering is an efficient solution which preserves the semantics, links different concepts between documents and extracts new information by means of several types of reasoning.

We present a methodology to adapt business standards to semantic web by mapping existing business documents defined on DTD and XML Schema to ontological representation. Also, we apply formal concept analysis to regroup ontology classes sharing semantics to improve the quality, readability and quality of ontologies. Finally, we apply ontology alignement to find semantic links between heteregenous business ontologies generated by the mapping process to overcome heterogeneity problems and to help entreprises to communicate fruitfully.