Research interests
My research interests fall generally in the area of databases, broadly interpreted, with a focus on the fundamental problems that surface when one combines high level formatted data access, e.g. SQL queries on relational databases, with higher level transaction and client interaction models, e.g., models supporting “begin transaction” and “end transaction”, and/or more detailed temporal specifications of client interaction such as a business process. I have a particular interest in databases with an underlying data source that corresponds to the contents of a main memory, and am particularly motivated by applications that involve embedded software that must support very high throughput or very low response time for data access and update. My research is on related topics and issues that are more foundational, and the results of this research are predominately analytic in nature. Most recently, I have worked on the following topics:
- description logics and ontology languages,
- query containment and more generally semantic query optimization,
- constraint theory, including temporal constraints and logics, and
- algorithms and data structures relating to semantic search and to tableau-based reasoning.
The following are some of my more recent publications on these topics.
Degrees and awards
BSc, MSc (British Columbia), PhD (Toronto)
Representative publications
J. Pound, I.F. Ilyas, and G. Weddell. Expressive and Flexible Access to Web-Extracted Data: A Keyword-based Structured Query Language, The ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), Indianapolis, Indiana, 2010
D. Toman and G. Weddell. Identifying Objects Over Time with Description Logics. Proceedings of KR, 2008.
J. Pound, L. Stanchev, D. Toman, and G. Weddell. On Ordering and Indexing Metadata for the Semantic Web. Proceedings of Description Logic Workshop (DL), pp. 1017-1032, 2008.
D. Toman and G. Weddell. PTIME Description Logics with Functional Constraints and their Extensions. Proceedings of CEDAR 2008 Workshop (in association with IJCAR), 2008.
S. Ben-David, R. Trefler, and G. Weddell. Bounded Model Checking with Description Logic Reasoning. Proceedings of TABLEAUX Conference, 2007.
D. Toman and G. Weddell. On Order Dependencies for the Semantic Web. Proceedings of ER Conference, 2007.
D. Toman and G. Weddell. On Keys and Functional Dependencies as First-Class Citizens in Description Logics. Proceedings of IJCAR Conference, 2006.
A. Hudek and G. Weddell. Binary Absorption in Tableau-Based Reasoning for Description Logics. Proceedings of Description Logics Workshop (DL), 2006.
