A fully funded PhD studentship at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham (UNMC & UNJC)

[Abdur Rakib]

Dear All,

 We invite applications for PhD study at the University of Nottingham,
UMNC&UNJC. Successful student will spend most of his/her time at UNMC and
will visit UNJC at least once for at least a couple of weeks.

Fixed term appointment for up to 36 months

Full tuition fees MR 42, 445 py + Stipend MR 2200 pm  (MR: Malaysian
Ringgit)

* *

*Project Title*

Ontology-driven crop base knowledge system

* **Supervisor names and contact details:*

1.       Abdur Rakib, School of Computer Science, UNMC (
Abdur.Rakib at nottingham.edu.my)

2.       Natasha Alechina, School of Computer Science, UNJC (
Natasha.Alechina at nottingham.ac.uk*)*



*Project Description*

The aim of this project is to combine and expand existing crop ontologies
and if needed modify them to ensure consistency, include data for
underutilised crops (e.g., Bambara groundnut), and provide support for
decision making by crop growers in selecting suitable crops for their
circumstances, including the type of land and climate, likely plant
diseases, pests and other problems, and implement a web tool to provide
this support with an ontology in the background. It is part of a
multidisciplinary research project, so other crop data required for this
project will be obtained from other collaborative CFFRC (
http://www.nottingham.edu.my/CFFRC/index.aspx) research projects.

We represent knowledge in Web Ontology Language (OWL) which extends RDF and
RDFS and which has been developed as an ontology language that defines
classes and properties and their relationships. The World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) has declared two different standards for OWL, namely, OWL
1 and OWL 2. We use OWL 2, which is based on description logic (DL), a
decidable fragment of first order logic that is used for efficient and
tractable reasoning. The resulting tool will use the ontology as the main
knowledge source for answering user queries, but will also involve an
additional rule-based decision support mechanism which will ask for
information about the concrete parameters relevant for the crop grower and
display information about suitable crops in the form which is precise but
easy to understand for non-computer scientist. In technical terms, the tool
is a hybrid system which uses both ontology definitions and rules.

The successful candidate will have a strong background in computer science
and must have excellent programming skills (particularly Java), basic
knowledge of ontology. Some knowledge of, or interest in, rule-based
reasoning and/or AI techniques, would be desirable. The successful
candidate will collaborate with other CFFRC researchers.

* *

*Applications must include:*

**

*(1)   A complete CV*
*

(2)   One page research statement indicating what you see are interesting
research issues relating to the above post and why your expertise is
relevant.

(3)   2 References
*

 *Closing Date*: 31st January 2013
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