Post-doctoral position in Semantic Techniques for the management of Earth Observation Data Key words: geographic data and metadata, ontologies, semantic web, ontology alignment Context: SparkInData FUI project (2015-2018) The SparkInData project is funded by the "heart of digital economy" program of the French government fund for future investment. While ATOS is the project leader, the list of partners includes the CNES, IGN and BRGM companies as well as various innovative companies specialised in the exploitation of Earth Observation data and the IRIT research laboratory. This three-years project has started in January 2015. It aims at developing a platform that will federate various sources of Earth Observation (EO) data for supporting the emergence of a rich ecosystem of new services and uses. SparkInData will give access to EO data coming from satellites and sensors, to a development environment, and to a catalog of innovative services that will benefit the players of downstream markets such as agriculture, urban planning, security, oceanography and climate studies. In work package 4, we will measure the gain brought by semantic technologies to better access, manage and analyse geographic data. The research areas in this project include ontology engineering, semantic data for image annotation, annotation data model for image search and analysis, ontology and data alignment. Position Description Within WP4, the postdoctoral candidate will work on approaches for automatically producing semantic data and metadata to annotate images, from standard metadata, ontologies and external resources like Linked Open Data. The aim is to improve image retrieval and analysis. This work will be jointly carried out with data producers and partners involved in use-case definitions for at least one of the target application fields. The main tasks and expected output are the following: - to set up methods, annotation models and tools to build relevant domain ontologies to describe images and geographic data in the selected application domain (possibly agriculture); - to build one or several open ontologies for at least one case study; - to produce and publish semantic metadata that will describe the collections of Earth observation images, based on the ontology, for the case study; - to enrich and align this metadata to LOD data. The candidate will define new alignment algorithms taking into account the specificities of geographic data, as well as methods and support tools for building and managing geographic ontologies in image processing systems. Methods and tools will be dedicated to at least one of the application fields (agriculture, oceanography, urban modelling, etc.). Requirements for this position Applicants are required to have a PhD in Computer Science, a strong background in semantic web technologies, ontology engineering, management and linked data alignment. Experience on geographical data, a good publication record and strong programing skills will be a plus. Fluency in written/spoken French and/or English. Work environment Localization : Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) - UPS, 118 Route de Narbonne F-31062 Toulouse Cedex - France Duration: 18 months - starting as soon as possible Hosting group: MELODI http://www.irit.fr/ -Equipe-MELODI- The candidate will work with two permanent and two post-doctoral researchers, using semantic data to perform new kinds of image processing, and to query the image collections using natural language. Income: between 1800 and 2700 euros free of taxes ("nets") each month according to past experience How to apply? Please send your application files as soon as possible. Applications will be accepted until the position is closed. Applicants should send a full CV including a complete list of publications, a cover letter indicating their research interests, achievements and vision for the future, as well as either support letters or the name of 2 persons that have worked with the candidate. Contact email addresses: Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles +33 5 61 55 82 93 or Cassia Trojahn +33 5 61 50 49 96