About us

Our context

OntoWeaver is developed by the Institut Pasteur (Paris), at the Computational Systems Biomedicine Lab. and the Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Hub, in collaboration with the Univeristy of Heidelberg and Helmholtz Munich.

It is funded by the DECIDER european project, which is working on precision medicine against high-grade serous ovarian cancer.

The biomedical field is probably the most advanced scientifical domain regarding the use of semantic knowledge graphs, ontologies and the curation of large knowledge databases. OntoWeaver is tailored for this kind of needs.

OntoWeaver is developed along with the BioCypher project which serves as a backend. Most of our team members contribute to both projects.

Main contributors

  • Johann Dreo, current maintainer. Johann designed OntoWeaver from scratch and implemented a most of it. He is a seasoned expert research engineer in explainable artificial intelligence and software engineering with a background in biomedicine and decision support systems.

  • Marko Baric participated to the architecture design and a large part of the implementation. He is a software engineer with a background in bioinformatics.

  • Claire Laudy designed the fusion engine architecture and contributed some code. She is a senior research engineer in symbolic and explainable artificial intelligence and a reknow international expert in high-level information fusion, with a background in man-machine interactions.

  • Matthieu Najm contributed a lot of end-user feedback, along with transformers code and fixes. He is a junior researcher in bioinformatics & biomedicine and our biological pathways wizzard.

  • Ekaterina Gaydukova contributed a lot of our tests and end-user feedback. She is a junior researcher in biomedicine, with a background in computer science.

  • Sebastian Lobentanzer contributed feedbacks and synchronization with the BioCypher projects, of which he is the main author. He is pharmacologist turned research software engineer, interested in causal relationships in molecular biology.

  • Benno Schwikowski contributed support and advices. He is the head of the Computational Systems Biomedicine Lab., in which OntoWeaver was developed. He is a reknown expert in systems biology, with a background in computer science.