Birte Glimm

My main research interests are knowledge representation and reasoning. In particular, I am developing query answering algorithms for expressive description logics. Most recently, I have developed algorithms for conjunctive queries in the Description Logics SHIQ and SHOQ together with Ian Horrocks, Uli Sattler, and Carsten Lutz. The Description SHIQ is the Description Logic that underlies OWL Lite, which is one of the W3C standardised Web Ontology Languages. Conjunctive queries are well known in the database community, which motivated the decision to study whether conjunctive query entailment is also decidable for expressive Description Logic knowledge bases. I also analysed the complexity of the developed algorithms and proved 2ExpTime upper bounds. For SHIQ, Carsten Lutz showed that the bound for SHIQ is tight and that conjunctive queries for SHIQ are, therefore, strictly harder than the standard reasoning tasks, such as knowledge base consistency or instance retrieval, which are ExpTime-complete.

Since October 2007 I work as a research assistant in the Computing Laboratory of the University of Oxford. I work in the Information Systems group, mainly on developing algorithms for automated reasoning in expressive Description Logics. You can contact me at firstname.lastname at comlab.ox.ac.uk.

From September 2004 until September 2007 I was a PhD student in the Information Management Group at the University of Manchester. The topic of my PhD thesis is Querying Description Logic Knowledge Bases and I was jointly supervised by Prof. Ian Horrocks and Prof. Ulrike Sattler. From September 2001 until July 2004 I studied Computer Science in the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and I received my bachelor degree with an award for the best degree. The topic of my bachelor report was "A Query Language for Web Ontologies" and I wrote the report as a visiting student at the University of Manchester.

Before studying Computer Science, I worked for 3.5 years in Industry and did another degree in Communication Design. My full CV in PDF format is available here.