Prof. Declan O'Sullivan

UPDATE 20th September 2024: Unfortunately I have no further availability to take any more projects. I am a Professor in Computer Science in the Knowledge and Data Engineering research group in SCSS, and a Principal Investigator in the SFI ADAPT centre (https://www.adaptcentre.ie/) I am generally interested in projects that have to cope with diverse data, both structured and unstructured, including geospatial data. Typically the projects I supervise use AI-based knowledge driven techniques such as linked data, semantic web, Knowledge Graphs, using W3C-based technologies such as RDF, SPARQL, OWL and RML. In this context I have an interest in the use of LLM/generative AI approaches to compliment these approaches. I have also an interest in how non-knowledge engineers/non-computer scientists experience, visualise and interact with data represented in knowledge graphs. In this context, I work with a variety of Humanities researchers (e.g. virtualtreasury.ie, searobend.ie, voicesproject.ie and fairvasc.eu) If you have a particular project you think might be of interest to me that uses such techniques, email me with a description and your idea. Otherwise check out the projects that are on offer this year

[ALLOCATED] 24/25 Aligning, Mining and Visualising Historical Records

Prof. Declan O'Sullivan (email | all projects)

The historical records in question relate to the tenant lists (rent rolls) for Coolattin, a major landed estate in Wicklow belonging to Earl Fitzwilliam, in the mid 19th century. The National Library has the estate papers, which include bound volumes of beautiful estate maps by townland, each with a list of tenants and the size … Read more

[ALLOCATED] 24/25 Project: Using advanced NLP techniques to support annotation of transcribed historical documents

Prof. Declan O'Sullivan (email | all projects)

With tools such as Transkribus (https://www.transkribus.org/) and eScriptorium (https://www.sofer.info/), AI-based image processing techniques are unblocking what has been a hugely expensive and time-intensive process of turning historical documents into machine readable transcriptions, in a manner that enables a scaling up of the process.The next problem that then needs to be tackled is how to support … Read more

[ALLOCATED] 24/25 Project: Timeline visualisation of people data

Prof. Declan O'Sullivan (email | all projects)

Using timelines to visualise critical data is particularly useful for domain experts to examine and analyse a wide range of data. For example for Historians a timeline visualisation such as seen in the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (https://timelines.virtualtreasury.ie/timelines/) is really helpful. This user interface was developed a number of years ago, and the intention … Read more

[ALLOCATED] 24/25 Student proposed – App/Tool based on open data in support of Societal good

Prof. Declan O'Sullivan (email | all projects)

Vast amounts of data is being published by governments as open data (e.g. https://data.gov.ie). Typically the decision to publish a dataset in an open manner is mandated but decision made in isolation as to how it could be integrated with other datasets. This research would focus on development of an App/Tool that would bring together … Read more

[ALLOCATED] 24/25: Authoritative Interlinking of Knowledge Graphs

Prof. Declan O'Sullivan (email | all projects)

Increasingly Knowledge Graphs are underpinning Digital Humanities projects to support the representation and interlinking of data. For example in the recently launched Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI), a KG is used to represent people, places, roles that appear in historical documents and their interconnection over the centuries. Typically these KGs are implemented using W3C … Read more