Declan O'Sullivan

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/) and the new national research centre "Rinn for Artificial Intelligence" (https://www.researchireland.ie/rinn-network/) 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 also have an interest in the use of LLM/generative AI approaches to compliment these approaches. Generally I have 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). 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.

[26/27] Project #8: Reviving a burnt catalogue

Declan O'Sullivan (email | all projects)

The Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) was established in 1867 to safely store centuries of Irish historical records dating back to the Norman invasion in 1169. As they gathered tens of thousands of documents into the allegedly fire-proof Record Treasury the PROI staff recorded each item in large handwritten volumes called the Transfer and … Read more

[26/27] Project #7: Annotating transcribed historical documents with NER/GenAI

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image processing techniques are unblocking what has been a hugely expensive and time-intensive process of turning historical documents into machine readable transcriptions, in a manner that enables a scaling up of the process.The next problem that then needs to be tackled is how to support …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

[ALREADY ALLOCATED FOR 26/27] Project #6: Timeline visualisation of people data

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 an early attempt of this (https://timelines.virtualtreasury.ie/timelines/) for the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland team is really helpful. This user interface was developed a … Read more

[26/27] Project #5: Using NLP/GenAI to support annotation of historical document transcriptions with Knowledge Graph entities

Declan O'Sullivan (email | all projects)

This project focuses on how to deploy Natural Language Processing and Generative AI approaches to support historians to annotate transcriptions with links to entities in an existing knowledge graph. Typically this means employing techniques to undertake Named Entity Recognition and Entity Linking tasks and providing candidate annotations to the historians through a simple user interface … Read more

[26/27] Project #4: Generative AI assisted synchronisation of knowledge graphs with evolving data source structures

Declan O'Sullivan (email | all projects)

Many knowledge graphs are not constructed from scratch, but rather are based on the ongoing uplift of data from existing data sources hosted in a variety of diverse data representations (relational data, JSON, CSV, XML etc.). The community has developed specifications that allow engineers who construct and maintain knowledge graphs to flexibly specify what data … Read more

[26/27] Project #3: Authoritative Interlinking of Knowledge Graphs

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), the KG of Irish History is used to represent people, places, roles that appear in historical documents and their interconnection over the centuries. Typically these KGs are … Read more

[26/27] Project #2: Student proposed – Novel User Interfaces for Historical Resources exploration by the public

Declan O'Sullivan (email | all projects)

Over the last number of years Digital Humanities projects such as the Virtual Record Treasury (virtualtreasury.ie) have attempted to provide user interfaces for public users to engage with the historical resources that are being digitised at speed and at scale.  The focus has primarily been placed on enabling this engagement through website organisation (themes, collections … Read more

[ALREADY ALLOCATED FOR 26/27] Project #1: Student proposed – App/Tool based on open data in support of Societal good

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