Gilles Falquet

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Geneva

mHealth apps are increasingly popular, offering tools like health tracking and personalized reminders to support these behaviors. Personalized messaging, tailored to the user’s profile, has been shown to improve engagement and retention around health topics. Research links personality traits (based on the Big Five model) with preferred app mechanis...

The World Health Organization identifies unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking, as significant risk factors contributing to mortality and morbidity, underscoring the necessity to adopt healthier habits. The increasing prevalence of health applications (apps) presents opportunities for promoting healthier lifestyles. Notably, personalized mobile heal...

Organisations heavily dependent on paper documents still spend a significant amount of time managing a large volume of documents. An intelligent document management system (DMS) is presented to automate the processing of tax and administrative documents. The proposed system fills a gap in the landscape of practical tools in the field of DMS and adv...

The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), one of the main knowledge organization systems in the biomedical domain, is constantly evolving following the latest scientific discoveries in health and life sciences. Previous research focused on quantifying information in MeSH using its hierarchical structure. In this work, we propose a data-driven approach b...

Wikidata is a knowledge graph increasingly adopted by many communities for diverse applications. Wikidata statements are annotated with qualifier-value pairs that are used to depict information, such as the validity context of the statement, its causality, provenances, etc. Handling the qualifiers in reasoning is a challenging problem. When definin...

Background Mobile health apps have the potential to motivate people to adopt healthier behavior, but many fail to maintain this behavior over time. However, it has been suggested that long-term adherence can be improved by personalizing the proposed interventions. Based on the literature, we created a conceptual framework for selecting appropriate...

Clinical pathways (CP) enable a standardized and an efficient management of patients with common pathologies. As operational tools, they take into account knowledge from guidelines and from the context (e.g. availability of resources) in which different interventions are to be carried out. Mastering the coherence of interactions between all these k...

BACKGROUND Although mobile health apps (mHealth) has the potential to motivate people to adopt healthier behaviors, many of them fail to maintain these behavior over time. This long-term adherence can be improved by personalizing the proposed interventions. Based on the literature, we have created a conceptual framework guiding the selection of app...

In the recent years the concept of knowledge graph has emerged as a way to aggregate information from various sources without imposing too strict data modelling constraints. Several graph models have been proposed during the years, ranging from the “standard” RDF to more expressive ones, such as Neo4J and RDF-star. The adoption of knowledge graph h...

The construction of an ontology of scientific knowledge objects, presented here, is part of the development of an approach oriented towards the visualization of scientific knowledge. It is motivated by the fact that the concepts of organization of scientific knowledge (theorem, law, experience, proof, etc.) appear in existing ontologies but that no...

Interest in the formal representation of citizen science comes from portals, platforms, and catalogues of citizen science projects; scientists using citizen science data for their research; and funding agencies and governments interested in the impact of citizen science initiatives. Having a common understanding and representation of citizen scienc...

Interest in the formal representation of citizen science comes from portals, platforms, and catalogues of citizen science projects; scientists using citizen science data for their research; and funding agencies and governments interested in the impact of citizen science initiatives. Having a common understanding and representation of citizen scienc...

Due to the large number of smartphone users, mHealth has become a popular support to foster users’ health behavior change Personalization is an important factor to increase the effectiveness of mHealth interventions. Based on a literature review, we have listed and categorized personalization concepts associated with behavior change in mHealth into...

This paper introduces the F2Concept database system that is an extension of the F2 object-oriented system. The main feature of F2Concept is its ability to represent intensional information about database classes. Intensional information, usually found in terminological databases, is useful for database modelling, operation, and evolution. A descrip...

This paper presents a model for representing compliance rules related to subsurface objects. Rules expressed in this model can be automatically evaluated (using SHACL or SPARQL) on existing 3D city models expressed in RDF. The main characteristics of the proposed model are (1) its expressiveness, that comes from the use of formal ontologies for rep...

Representing the context of triples and reasoning on contextualized triples is an open problem in the semantic web. In this paper, we present \(OWL^{C}\): a contextual two-dimensional web ontology language. Using the first dimension, we can define contexts-dependent classes, properties, and axioms and using the second dimension, we can express know...

The application of the linked data principles provide a simple and effective way to publish and share data on the Web. The publication of geodata on the Web bas been studied and developed for a long time, leading to the creation of geo vocabularies and ontologies as well as geographic query languages. This is also true for 3D geodata, for which mul...

When scientists are searching for information, they generally have a precise objective in mind. Instead of looking for documents “about a topic T”, they try to answer specific questions such as finding the definition of a concept, finding results for a particular problem, checking whether an idea has already been tested, or comparing the scientific...

La construction d’une ontologie des objets de connaissance scientifique, présenté ici, s’inscrit dans le développement d’une approche orientée à la visualisation des connaissances scientifiques. Il est motivé par le fait que les concepts d’organisation de la connaissance scientifique (théorème, loi, expérience, preuve, ...) apparaissent dans des on...

The publication of linked geodata on the semantic web may involve relatively complex operations to map source data to their published version and to link these ones to other datasets. In this paper we propose a technique to provide a compact and abstract description of this process. This technique is based on the use of RDF graph mapping rules that...

The study and publication of historical scientific manuscripts are com- plex tasks that involve, among others, the explicit representation of the text mean- ings and reasoning on temporal entities. In this paper we present the first results of an interdisciplinary project dedicated to the study of Saussure's manuscripts. These results aim to fulfil...

Processing and publishing the data of the historical sciences in the semantic web is an interesting challenge in which the representation of temporal aspects plays a key role. We propose in this paper a model of temporal knowledge representation adapted to work on historical documents. This model is based on the notion of fluent that is represented...

We present a Sign Language modelling approach allowing to build grammars and create linguistic input for Sign synthesis through avatars. We comment on the type of grammar it allows to build, and observe a resemblance between the resulting expressions and traditional semantic representations. Comparing the ways in which the paradigms are designed, w...

Thesauri are knowledge models commonly used for information classification and retrieval whose structure is defined by standards that describe the main features the concepts and relations must have. However, following these standards requires a deep knowledge of the field the thesaurus is going to cover and experience in their creation. To help in...

We propose a categorization algorithm for text content description such as tags for images from social media or crowd sourcing services, to identify places characteristics. The algorithm is based on a spatial coverage and a multi-facets categorization. We describe how it can be applied to individually process images from Flickr in order to extract...

This technical paper is a contribution to the identification of current challenges of semantic 3D city models. They are presented in four parts, namely 3D enriched city models and their connection with urban information models and smartcities, urban models integration, urban analyses and data. This work is an output of the COST Action TU0801 "Seman...

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) plays an increasing role in current geodata provision. At the same time, due to its lack of structure, it is hard to use as meaningful input in software applications. In this chapter, we embark upon the unstructured character of VGI and on ways to enrich the structure in order to make it suitable for informa...

Thesauri are knowledge models commonly used for information classification and retrieval whose structure is defined by standards such as the ISO 25964. However, when creators do not correctly follow the specifications, they construct models with inadequate concepts or relations that provide a limited usability. This paper describes a process that a...

There exist many popular crowdsourcing and social services (Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)) to share information and documents such as Flickr, Foursquare, Twitter , Facebook, etc. They all use metadata, folksonomy and more importantly a geographic axis with GPS coordinates and/or geographic tags. Using this available folksonomy in VGI ser...

In this paper we show that connecting terminological resources with other knowledge resources, such as text corpora, aligned texts, or ontologies can enhance their applicability and quality. We first show how the tools developed at Olanto leverage different types of knowledge resources and processes to provide new functionalities. Then we present a...

The Health On the Net’s Foundation (HON) Code of Conduct, HONcode, is the oldest and the most used ethical and trustworthy code for medical and health related information available on the Internet. Until recently, websites voluntarily applying for the HONcode seal were evaluated manually by an expert medical team according to 8 principles, referred...

Authors evaluated supervised automatic classification algorithms for determination of health related web-page compliance with individual HONcode criteria of conduct (www.hon.ch/Conduct.html). The current study used varying length character n-gram vectors to represent healthcare web page documents – not the traditional approach of using word vectors...

Answering precise and complex queries on a corpus of scientific documents requires a precise modelling of the document contents. In particular, each document element must be characterised by its discourse type (hypothesis, definition, result, method, etc.). In this paper we present a scientific document model (SciAnnotDoc) that takes into account t...

La terminologie est largement dépendante du contexte d’utilisation et varie donc d’une organisation à une autre. Nous présentons un outil qui facilite l’exploration terminologique. A partir d’un terme, il permet de chercher interactivement des traductions, les termes composés, des synonymes et éventuellement d’autres termes qui lui sont associés. C...

When creating 3D city models, selecting relevant visualization techniques is a particularly difficult user interface design task. A first obstacle is that current geodata-oriented tools, e.g. ArcGIS, have limited 3D capabilities and limited sets of visualization techniques. Another important obstacle is the lack of unified description of informatio...

This technical paper is a contribution to the identification of current challenges of semantic 3D city models. They are presented in four parts, namely 3D enriched city models and their connection with urban information models and smartcities, urban models integration, urban analyses and data. This work is an output of the COST Action TU0801 “Seman...

When performing document search, scientists have specific goals in mind. We conducted interviews with scientists to understand exactly how they were looking for information and working with documents. We found that scientists are generally searching specific discourse elements, not the entire document. Therefore, we created an annotation model that...

Résumé : Les applications du Web sémantique utilisent et produisent un grand nombre de ressources termino-ontologiques. Malgré l'hétérogénéité de ces ressources, elles peuvent partager ou importer des mêmes entités (concepts, termes, individus, ...). Idéalement, ces ressources doivent être alignées afin de pouvoir reformuler des requêtes pour mieux...

Session 1 : Construction, peuplement et exploitation d'ontologies

Automated processes such as cartographic generalisation require formal abstraction of the geographic space in order to analyse, process and transform it. Spatial relations are key to understanding geographic space and their modelling is a critical issue. This chapter reports on existing classifications and modelling frameworks for spatial relations...

Considering sustainable development of cities implies investigating cities in a holistic way taking into account many interrelations between various urban or environmental issues. 3D city models are increasingly used in different cities and countries for an intended wide range of applications beyond mere visualization. Could these 3D City models be...

Virtual 3D city models are used for different applications such as urban planning, navigation, pedestrian behaviour, historical information, and disaster management. These applications require rich information models that associate urban objects not only with their geometric properties but also with other types of information. When designing such m...

Since the invention of the Semantic Web concept, the number of ontological and terminological resources on the Web has been increasing. These heterogeneous resources may share entities or contain similar ones. To cope with the diversity of these resources and collect them, resources repositories have been created. Matching entities belonging to dif...

The limited semantics of thesauri and similar knowledge models hinder the searching and browsing possibilities of the bibliographic databases classified with this type of resource. This work proposes an automatic process to convert a knowledge model into a domain ontology through the alignment with DOLCE, an upper level ontology. This process is fa...

Version October 2013

When scientists are looking for information in document collections, they generally have a precise objective in mind: They want to find all the definitions of a concept, all the results for a particular problem, or to compare the scientific conclusions of multiples articles. In this research, we have developed a user-centric annotation model based...

De plus en plus d'environnements virtuels 3D servent à présenter des informations qui n'ont pas de représentation directe sous forme d'objets géométriques (textes, données numériques) et pour lesquelles une technique de visualisation appropriée doit être utilisée. C'est le cas notamment des modèles urbains 3D enrichis qui contiennent non seulement...

Version February 2013

In urban semantic digital libraries, users need to access heterogeneous types of resources in order to achieve a given task. Contextualisation is known to increase the understanding of documents. With the use of 3D city models, we propose an alignment model that correlates, using the semantic annotations, the different resources of the repository w...

Models, which represent in 3 dimensions the geometric elements of a city, are called 3D city models. Those models are used for an intended wide range of applications beyond mere visualization. Such uses are made possible by enriching the geometrical aspects with urban or environmental data that cannot be perceptible to a user without a visual abstr...

Relations that occur between features located in space-like the fact that a street is surrounded by very high buildings, that an airport is close to a city- as well as spatial properties of features-like the height and width of a door- play an important role for many urban applications. Digital models of cities can assist in the evaluation of these...

Knowledge based applications require linguistic, terminological and ontological resources. These applications are used to fulfill a set of tasks such as semantic indexing, knowledge extraction from text, in-formation retrieval, etc. Using these resources and combining them for the same application is a tedious task with different levels of complex-...

In 2012 Switzerland will adopt a system for hospital funding, named SwissDRG, based on the German Diagnosis Related Group model. This method of funding takes little account of nursing as the grouping is based on diagnoses and treatments. This study conducted at the University Hospital of Lausanne seeks to introduce nursing data in the medical stati...

Nursing problem Summary : a first step to a NMDS In 2012 Switzerland will adopt a system for hospital funding, named SwissDRG, based on the German Diagnosis Related Group model. This method of funding takes little account of nursing as the grouping is based on diagnoses and treatments. Objective : This study conducted at the University Hospital of...

3D city models - which represent in 3 dimensions the geometric elements of a city - are increasingly used for an intended wide range of applications. Such uses are made possible by using semantically enriched 3D city models and by presenting such enriched 3D city models in a way that allows decision-making processes to be carried out from the best...

The holistic approach to sustainable urban planning implies using different models in an integrated way that is capable of simulating the urban system. As the interconnection of such models is not a trivial task, one of the key elements that may be applied is the description of the urban geometric properties in an "interoperable" way. Focusing on a...

In the context of city models, explicit semantics in terms of spatial relations and spatial properties play a crucial role for many applications and use cases. 3D models offer new opportunities (but also new challenges) to manage spatial relations and properties in city models. The work presented in this paper aims at proposing an extension of City...

When scientists or engineers are looking for information in document collections, or on the web, they generally have a precise objective in mind. Instead of looking for documents "about a topic T", they rather try to answer specific needs such as finding the definition of a concept, finding results for a particular problem, checking whether an idea...

The project of developing an urban ontology for road systems is to be viewed in the context of a lack of coordination tools between urban engineering actors. The aim is to fill this gap. By reducing semantic disagreement and increasing data interchange, this tool should improve urban maintenance services (road system maintenance, public spaces, etc...

The urban morphological processes ontology (URMOPRO) has been developed to find an intermediate level of abstraction between the quantitative measures and the conceptual frameworks needed to understand the observable changes in the cityscape (i.e. morphological processes). The domain of application of this ontology is urban morphology research.

This article aims to cast some light on the dilemma of data transfer and storage by offering examples and experiences of the ontological approach at a building scale. The world of Geographic Information Systems is not alone facing the fact. In many a field it is nowadays impossible to conduct ‘business as usual’ without the aid of sophisticated com...

Various accurate urban models have been developed and are used in the urban field, to perform for example air quality calculation, building energy consumption or traffic simulation. 3D city models representing the structure of a city in three dimensions are special urban models issued from 3D GIS (3 Dimensional Geographic Information Systems). The...

This article provides insight into linkages of data within a common spatial ontology over different scales, that are not obvious from the perspective of software interoperability. The aim of text is to stress the importance of the data usage and potentials that open up when large amounts of digital representations comes available. The focus is on i...

Since the development of ontologies from scratch requires much time and many resources, the activity of knowledge acquisition constitutes one of the most important steps at the beginning of the ontology development process. This activity is essential in all the different methodologies for ontology design as a previous step to the conceptualization...

In this section, we discuss the notion of ontology in relation to the Scottish Building Regulations. There is no formal ontology associated with these regulations, and the interest here is partly in investigating why. This is therefore less a case-study than the study of a non-case, but we hope that it will point to some useful issues about the pot...

The European Union (EU) Community Strategic Guidelines 2007–2013 place particular emphasis on the specific needs of certain zones, such as urban and rural areas. The guidelines encourage an “integrated approach” towards cohesion policy, not only stimulating growth and creating jobs, but also pursuing certain social and environmental objectives.

Geographical information (GI) or geoinformation describes phenomena associated directly or indirectly with a location (coordinates systems, address systems…) with respect to the Earth’s surface. Such phenomena can be either spatially discrete (represented by geometric primitives like points, lines, regions, etc.) such as a municipality, a road axis...

The definition of an ontology as a specification of a conceptualization of a domain is independent of the terminology used in a particular natural language to describe this domain. In fact we can make a clear distinction between the conceptual structure of a domain and the way the concepts are designated by terms in a natural language. This view is...

Given the broad range of applications for ontologies, how can we analyse the relations between ontologies and their social and cultural contexts? The source of many of the issues we stumble upon in dealing with ontologies in the real world, can be found in philosophy. Perhaps not surprisingly, philosophy delivers some plausible tools for analyzing...

The goal of this chapter is to help readers understand how ontologies can be used to improve interoperability between heterogeneous information systems. We understand interoperability as the ability of an information system or its components to share information and applications.

Concepts in the domain of Urban Civil Engineering are often categorized and described using ontologies. Such ontologies may be designed independently by domain experts who have a minimal communication or no communication between them. As a result, similar concepts may be described differently and their categorization may result in heterogeneous ont...

Le nombre croissant d'ontologies disponibles sur le web a justifié l'apparition d'entrepôts d'ontologies. Cependant, peu d'entre eux intègrent également des ressources hétérogènes de type ontologique, textuelle, linguistique et terminologique. De plus, ils ne fournissent pas un ensemble complet d'opérateurs permettant la gestion et le traitement de...

In the information retrieval context, resource collections are frequently classified using thesauri. However, the limited semantics provided by thesauri restricts the collection search and browsing capabilities. This work focuses on improving these capabilities by transforming a set of resources indexed according to a thesaurus into a semantically...

Available through: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-724-2

Ontologies are increasingly recognized as essential components in many fields of information science. Ontologies were first employed in artificial intelligence, as a means to conceptualize some part of the real world. The first aim was to enable software system to reason about real-world entities. The CyC ontology (Lenat 1995) is typical of this pe...

Ontologies are increasingly recognized as essential tools in information science. Although the concepts are well understood theoretically , the practical implementation of ontologies remains challenging. In this book, researchers in computer science, information systems, ontology engineering, urban planning and design, civil and building engineerin...

In this task 2,000 patents in three languages (English, French and German) were to be classified among approximately 600 categories. We used a classifier based on neural networks of the Winnow type. This classi- fier is already used for similar tasks in professional applications. We test- ed three different approaches to improve the classification...

Multiple sources of information can improve knowledge mangement if they are properly combined and processed. Knowledge engineering usually relies on knowledge resources, typically ontologies. We propose a domain-independent framework which models, combines and represents heterogenous sources of information. Our aim is to build a resources repositor...

Documents are rich resources containing knowledge describing a specific domain. That's why their processing is a common task, which is based on the use of terminological and ontological resources. Various types of ontologies, thesauri, and a large list of resources are commonly used in the process of knowledge extraction. The modeling and reuse of...