Knowledge Engineering
Designing knowledge graphs, semantic models, ontologies and vocabularies that structure complex information and support interoperability and reasoning.
Semantic AI / Knowledge Systems
Margherita Martorana PhD
Knowledge Engineering & Neurosymbolic AI
Ontologies · Knowledge Graphs · Semantic Technologies · Multimodal AI · Interoperability
I design knowledge-driven systems that combine structured representations, semantic technologies and AI to make complex information more interoperable, reusable and actionable across domains.
Focus areas
What I Work On
Short placeholder descriptions for the themes this site will highlight.
Neurosymbolic AI
Connecting LLMs, VLMs and multimodal models with structured knowledge to support grounding, reasoning, explainability and action.
Semantic Data Integration
Using metadata, semantic technologies and knowledge representation to connect heterogeneous data and support discovery, FAIRness and reuse.
Applied Knowledge Systems
Developing knowledge-driven solutions across domains including robotics, clinical operations, research data and other complex information environments.
Selected publications
Selected Publications
A compact selection of publications across robotics, semantic technologies and restricted-access data integration.
An Ontology for Unified Modeling of Tasks, Actions, Environments, and Capabilities in Personal Service Robotics
Margherita Martorana, Francesca Urgese, Ilaria Tiddi, Stefan Schlobach / Preprint / 2025
Bridging Bots: from Perception to Action via Multimodal-LMs and Knowledge Graphs
Margherita Martorana, Francesca Urgese, Mark Adamik, Ilaria Tiddi / 19th Conference on Neurosymbolic Learning and Reasoning (NeSy 2025), Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Vol. 284 / 2025
Metadata-driven Table Union Search: Leveraging Semantics for Restricted Access Data Integration
Margherita Martorana, Tobias Kuhn, Jacco van Ossenbruggen / Preprint / 2025
Zero-Shot Topic Classification of Column Headers: Leveraging LLMs for Metadata Enrichment
Margherita Martorana, Tobias Kuhn, Lise Stork, Jacco van Ossenbruggen / Knowledge Graphs in the Age of Language Models and Neuro-Symbolic AI, SEMANTiCS 2024 / 2024
Portfolio
Selected Projects
Temporary project cards. Final project names and details can be added later.
Bridging Bots
Neurosymbolic framework combining multimodal language models, ontologies and knowledge graphs for robotic perception, reasoning and action.
Multimodal AI
Ontologies
Robotics
View project ->
OntoBOT
Semantic model connecting robot tasks, actions, environments and capabilities to support interoperable and context-aware robotic systems.
Knowledge graphs
Ontologies
Interoperability
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MetaUnionSearch
Metadata-driven semantic table union search for restricted-access data, enabling data integration without requiring access to sensitive values.
Metadata
FAIR data
Search
View project ->
MetaLinker
LLM- and RAG-based methods for semantic annotation and linking of table metadata.
LLMs
RAG
Metadata
View project ->
About
About
I am a Knowledge Engineer and Neurosymbolic AI researcher with a PhD in Computer Science. My work focuses on designing knowledge representations and AI systems that connect heterogeneous data, structured semantics and neural models.
I have worked across multiple domains, including clinical operations, personal service robotics, restricted-access research data and metadata-driven data integration. Across these settings, the common challenge has been the same: how to represent complex knowledge in a way that supports interoperability, reasoning and reuse.
I currently work at UMC Utrecht, where I design knowledge architectures and semantic models for clinical operations. Previously, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, I developed neurosymbolic AI approaches combining knowledge graphs, ontologies, multimodal models and robotic perception. My PhD research focused on semantic approaches for making restricted-access data more FAIR, discoverable and reusable.
Knowledge Systems
Knowledge graphs, ontology engineering, RDF, SPARQL, JSON-LD, semantic web technologies, metadata modelling, vocabularies, semantic interoperability, FAIR data.
AI & ML
LLMs, NLP, embeddings, semantic search, RAG, multimodal AI, VLMs, neurosymbolic AI, AI evaluation.
Engineering
Python, SQL, ETL pipelines, APIs, data translation workflows, Docker, Kubernetes, GCP, Azure, Git.
Contact
Contact
Interested in collaborating, discussing knowledge engineering or neurosymbolic AI, or exploring related work? You can find me on LinkedIn or reach me by email.
LinkedIn
Email hello [at] margheritamartorana [dot] com