C. Maria Keet

Dr. C. Maria Keet is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. With a PhD from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (2008), she has established herself as a leading researcher in ontology engineering and multilingual natural language processing, particularly for African languages.

Her research interests span Ontology Engineering, Knowledge Representation, Natural Language Processing for African languages (especially isiZulu), Conceptual Data Modeling, and Temporal Data Modeling. She has developed significant frameworks for ontology modularization, competency questions, and multilingual knowledge representation. Her work bridges theoretical computer science with practical applications for linguistic diversity in Africa, addressing the critical need for technology that serves low-resourced languages.

Her recent publications (2023-2025) reveal a strong focus on advancing ontology engineering methodologies, improving multilingual language processing capabilities, and developing tools for temporal data modeling. She has pioneered approaches for representing African languages in computational systems, with particular attention to noun classification, verb conjugation, and part-whole relations in Bantu languages.

Dr. Keet has made substantial contributions to educational resources in her field, including her 2023 book The What and How of Modelling Information and Knowledge - From Mind Maps to Ontologies, which serves as a comprehensive guide to knowledge representation techniques.

She actively supervises graduate students and has developed in-house tools specifically for ontology engineering education, demonstrating her commitment to advancing both research and teaching in her field.