Post-Doctoral Research Visit – Construction, enhancement and exploitation of a Knowledge graph for natural pests regulation in agronomy

Type de contrat : CDD Contexte et atouts du poste INRIA is the French national research institute dedicated to computer science and applied mathematics and is a founding member of the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The Inria centre at Université Côte d'Azur includes 42 research teams and 9 support services. The centre's staff (about 500 people) is made up of scientists of different nationalities, engineers, technicians, and administrative staff. The teams are mainly located on the university campuses of Sophia Antipolis and Nice as well as Montpellier, in close collaboration with research and higher education laboratories and establishments (Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, INRAE, INSERM ...), but also with the regional economic players. The Wimmics team works on the topic of AI on the Web, in particular knowledge graphs and (linked) data representation and processing in the Semantic Web. Wimmics contributes to knowledge formalization and semantic-based methods to extract, control, query, validate, infer, explain and interact with knowledge in epistemic communities on the Web. Wimmics has been involved in numerous European research projects (e.g., CoMMA, SevenPro, Sealife, Palette, Aloof, MIREL, HyperAgents) and national projects with a focus on knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) in the Semantic Web (e.g., ISICIL, DataLift, SMILK, WASABI, D2KAB, Dekalog). This postdoc position takes place within the context of the EcoControl project funded by PEPR Agroécologie et Numérique, with partners from INRAE. EcoControl aims to improve our understanding of arthropod regulatory services and identify agroecological levers to enhance natural pest regulation in agriculture at both local and territorial levels. To achieve this goal, the project will address the following research questions: How do biotic and abiotic factors, whether phylogenetic, environmental, related to farming practices or to the introduction of alien species, influence the structure and dynamics of interaction networks between plants, pests, and their natural enemies? Mission confiée The main task of the candidate will be to develop an ontology-based model to represent the literature-extracted information on plants pests and auxiliaries and integrate it with species traits and distribution data available in existing knowledge bases, to form an ecosystem of  interconnected RDF knowledge graphs. In relation with other partners, a base of competency questions should be elicited, that need to be implemented and answered using the final knowledge graph. The graph will be validated by implementing these questions in SPARQL. The candidate should then develop a set of tools for the visual representation and exploration of the knowledge graph, and its enhancement using graph representation learning approaches and downstream applications (e.g. link prediction). The candidate will also manage the project plan, the deliverables and the meetings with our team. Principales activités • Design a semantic model to represent the data of interest (ontology and thesauri) • Build a pipeline to automate the generation of the knowledge graph from the information extracted in the scientific literature and databases of observations (in conformance with the semantic model) • Collect the competency questions and implement them in SPARQL • Develop methods to enhance the graphs and capture knowledge changes • Develop an interface for the visualization and exploitation of the graph • Present, explain, and justify results. • Follow and manage the tasks of our team in the EcoControl project and participate in its calls and meetings and the supervision of internships. References https://eng-pepr-agroeconum.custom.hub.inrae.fr/funded-projects/data-processing-and-modeling/cfp-awarded-projects/ecocontrol Nadia Yacoubi Ayadi , Stephan Bernard , Robert Bossy , Marine Courtin , Bill Gates Happi Happi et al.A Unified approach to publish semantic annotations of agricultural documents as knowledge graphs, Smart Agricultural Technology, 2024, 8. Cristhian Figueroa , Nadia Yacoubi Ayadi , Nicolas Audoux , Catherine Faron, CoffeeWKG: A Weather Knowledge Graph for Coffee Regions in Colombia, SmartFood 2023 - Workshop on Controlled Vocabularies and Data platforms for Smart Food Systems Aline Menin, Franck Michel, Catherine Faron, VENUS: A Declarative Visualization Library for Knowledge Graph Exploration, ESWC 2026 - 23rd European Semantic Web Conference Botella, C., Dray, S., Matias, C., Miele, V., Thuiller, W., 2022. An appraisal of graph embeddings for comparing trophic network architectures. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 13. Tibi, A., Martinet, V, Vialatte, A., Alignier, A., Angeon, V., Bohan, D.A., Bougherara, D., Cordeau, S., Courtois, P., Deguine, J.-P., Enjalbert, J., Fabre, F., Fréville, H., Grateau, R., Grimonprez, B., Gross, N., Hannachi, M., Launay, M., Lelièvre, V., Lemarié, S., Martel, G., Navarrete, M., Plantegenest, M., Ravigné, V., Rusch, A., Suffert, F., Thoyer, S.