François Dongier

Current

• Consultant in semantic web and knowledge technologies (Self-employed)

Past

• Consultant in artificial intelligence at TRACTEBEL Engineering, Brussels
• Software developer at QUEBEC Ministry of Education, Montreal
• Philosophy teacher at CEGEP Maisonneuve, Montreal

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Education

• McGill University

Connections

45 connections

Industry

Internet

François Dongier’s Summary

I am very interested in the Internet's potential to revolutionize knowledge sharing and reuse. Initially, the web was just a web of documents, making access to knowledge easier but not radically different from what we were used to. In recent years, it allowed people to create networks, with collective writings (such as Wikipedia), shared tags, shared pictures, and the like. And now, through semantic technology, the web is becoming a web of data, allowing large data sets from multiple sources to be integrated, remixed and presented in more powerful, meaningful, and useful ways.

The next web will be populated with software agents capable of reasoning and learning. This will certainly be great fun, but we are not there yet... In the meantime, there are, just right now, fascinating projects going on, attempting for instance to turn Wikipedia's content into a structured, editable and searchable database, which will make it immensely more useful than it is now.

I am available to consult in helping companies take advantage of this new dataweb :

* open their data via APIs and web services
* convert their data to RDF, linking it to formal ontologies for better data schema integration and interoperability
* mashup internal and external data
* query RDF stores with tools such as SPARQL.

In my spare time, I also teach computer programming (Logo, Python, Yahoo Pipes) and have a special interest in the application of IT to teaching. My project in this area (not patented yet!) is called "One turtle per child".

François Dongier’s Specialties:

Semantic web, mashups, RSS, RDF, OWL, ontologies, web services, semantic web services, open data, artificial intelligence, logic, knowledge engineering, knowledge modelling, software agents, automated reasoning, machine learning, text mining, data mining, Web 2.0

François Dongier’s Experience

• Consultant in semantic web and knowledge technologies

  Self-employed

  (Self-Employed; Information Technology and Services industry)

  2001 — Present (7 years)

  - Semantic Web: development of ontologies with XML, RDF, OWL, PROTEGE and RACER
  - Turning Wikipedia content into machine understandable data, with Freebase and DBpedia (using open APIs and SPARQL for queries)
  - Text and web mining: algorithms and tools for Bayesian classification, clustering and entity extraction
  - RSS and mashups
  - E-learning: learning object repositories, concept maps, student profiles
  - Collaborative tools, blogs, wikis
  - User-editable profiles and recommendation engines
  - OTPC (One turtle per child): programming course using LOGO, PYTHON and Yahoo Pipes
  - "Open" movements: Open Source, Open Data, Open Content, Open Knowledge

• Consultant in artificial intelligence

  TRACTEBEL Engineering, Brussels

  (Mechanical or Industrial Engineering industry)

  1985 — 2001 (16 years)

  - Planning of nuclear plant fuel reshuffling (heuristic search, LISP)
  - Short-term electrical load forecasting using neural networks
  - Expert systems for diagnosis of electrical equipment (KEE, LISP)
  - Planning of maintenance operations in substations (LISP)
  - A tool for semantic network modelling of activities, processes, and domain knowledge, with automatic generation of a website from the model built with the tool (SMALLTALK, LISP)

• Software developer

  QUEBEC Ministry of Education, Montreal

  (Higher Education industry)

  1983 — 1986 (3 years)

  - Development in LISP of a logic tutoring system (natural deduction, Venn diagrams)
  - Using PROLOG to model the content of video disks

• Philosophy teacher

  CEGEP Maisonneuve, Montreal

  (Higher Education industry)

  1981 — 1983 (2 years)

  Teaching logic and philosophy of science

François Dongier’s Education

• McGill University

  M.A., M.Sc., Philosophy, Computer Science, 1975 — 1982

  Concentration: logic, philosophy of science, artificial intelligence, automated reasoning

Additional Information

François Dongier’s Interests:

*** Chess, sailing, wine, hiking in Marseilles' calanques *** Disruptive technologies *** The problem of consciousness (how it emerged, how to reproduce it) *** Singularity (Kurzweil)

François Dongier’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• expertise requests
• reference requests
• getting back in touch