Welcome to the KASTLE Lab

The Knowledge and Semantic Technologies (KASTLE) Laboratory was founded in 2022 at Wright State University by Dr. Cogan Shimizu.

KASTLE Lab’s mission is to

• develop fundamental advances in knowledge engineering, especially as they pertain to knowledge graphs and including the development of relevant cyberinfrastructure;
• explore the intersection between knowledge engineering, domain science, and machine/deep learning for the purpose of accelerating science and promoting data discovery and transdisciplinary research;
• understand the bridge between human-conceptualization and machine-encoding to better align and design AI systems; and
• advance the state of open curriculum in knowledge engineering and semantic technologies.

Notices

• E-mails to the lab which request a position, but have not read the Recruiting page, will not receive a response. This pertains to the request of funded positions or topics that are out-of-scope for the lab’s expertise.
• Accepting Independent Study requests, Master’s Thesis Proposals, Research Projects, and more. Please see the recruiting page for more details.
• KASTLE Lab is hosting the Wright State University “Week of Knowledge” on our very own campus.
  • The United States Semantic Technologies Symposium (US2TS 2025) – Dec 08-10, 2025
  • The International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2025) – Dec 10-12, 2025

Recent News

• Sep 2025 – Cogan Shimizu will serve as the Program Chair for SEMANTiCS 2026!
• Sep 2025 – Cogan Shimizu will serve as the Program Chair for NeSy 2026!
• Sep 2025 – Antrea Christou presents their short research paper, "” at SEMANTiCS 2025!
• Sep 2025 – Cogan Shimizu gives two keynotes at workshops co-located with SEMANTiCS 2025!
  • “Accelerating Knowledge Engineering with Modularity” at 2nd Workshop on Knowledge Graphs and Neurosymbolic AI.
  • “Towards Understanding Structures in KG Embedding Spaces for Experimental Design” at
• Sep 2025 – Cogan Shimizu gives talk, ”,” at Vienna University of Business and Economics and has a highly successful research visit with Fajar Ekaputra, Marta Sabou, Sabrina Kirrane, Axel Polleres, Dagmar Gromann, Katja Hose, and many students!
• Aug 2025 – Cogan Shimizu has a paper, “OntoInsight – A Metric-Guided Tool for Ontology Quality Evaluation with LLM-Powered Recommendations,” accepted to ER 2025.
• Aug 2025 – Krischal Dhungel, Susan Shrestha, and Sumit Sunar join KASTLE Lab to complete their MS thesis! Welcome!
• Aug 2025 – Emily Miller joins KASTLE Lab to complete their Departmental Honors Thesis! Welcome!
• Aug 2025 – KASTLE Lab wins $500,000 award from the National Science Foundation for “Prototyping a new Knowledge Resource for modern AI (Proto-KAI),” in partnership with Vinay Chaudhri (Knowledge Systems Research, LLC) and Alessandro Oltramari (Carnegie Bosch Insitute).
• Aug 2025 – Cogan Shimizu runs a highly attended workshop "” at Accelerate 2025!
• Jul 2025 – Cogan Shimizu runs “(Actual) Neurosymbolic AI: Combining Deep Learning and Knowledge Graphs”, a Dagstuhl Seminar!
• June 2025 – Cogan Shimizu gives talk, ”,” at X, Örebro Univeristy and has a highly successful research visit with Hadi Banae, Stephanie Lowry, and Fjollë Novakazi!
• June 2025 – Cogan Shimizu gives keynote, ”,” at X co-located with ESWC 2025.
• May 2025 – Ashish Pokhrel and Jon Wasky join KASTLE Lab as Scientific Programmers! Welcome!
• Feb 2025 – KASTLE Lab wins $300,000 award from the National Science Foundation for “EAGER: A Translational Institute for Knowledge Axiomatization – A Feasibility Study,” in partnership with Vinay Chaudhri (Knowledge Systems Research, LLC).
• Feb 2025 – Anmol Saini has their paper, “Polymer Data Extraction and KG Population Using LLMs,” accepted to First AAAI Bridge on Artificial Intelligence for Scholarly Communication 2025.
• Jan 2025 – “Accelerating Knowledge Graph and Ontology Engineering with Large Language Models“ is published in the Journal of Web Semantics.
• Jan 2025 – Cogan Shimizu gives keynote, “Modular Ontology Modeling” at SemTech 2025.
• Dec 2024 – “Education in the era of neurosymbolic AI“ is published in the Journal of Web Semantics.
• See More News

More Useful Links

In addition to the links in the sidebar, see the following links for interesting, useful, or related resources for

• Cogan’s Personal Webpage
• The PRAXIS Initiative – a nexus for educational materials and activities, pertaining to knowledge engineering
• The Open Knowledge Graph Curriculum – a curated set of modules for learning about knowledge graphs
• The Association for Ontology Design and Patterns – the community surrounding ontology design patterns development, usage, and other aspects of ontology design