Professor Briggs becomes Dr. Briggs

Today, Professor Briggs successfully defended his PhD dissertation. Titled, " Constraint Generation and Reasoning in OWL," it was focused on weaknesses in the current set of semantic web documents in the Swoogle database. In particular, these documents are often not completely specified and Briggs investigated ways to automatically complete those specifications. Those generated restrictions could cause issues with the subsequent reasoning, so Briggs also developed theoretically sound modifications to the standard reasoning rules that detect such problems and can retract everything that was inferred from generated restrictions.



This is an important milestone for our department. Dr. Briggs has been a strong faculty member throughout his tenure with us and we are pleased that he will be able to continue to challenge our students in a wide variety of ways.