The amount of scientific data has dramatically increased with the development of faster and cheaper technology. It 2020, 44 trillion gigabytes are expected to be found as digital data. The manual processing of scientific data is no longer scalable.
My research aims to improve the automated discovery, integration, analysis and interpretation of scientific data by providing context, or meaning to information using Semantic Web technologies. This context, encoded in ontologies can be used by computers to identify data and models required to answer a specific research question. The impact of my work can be clearly appreciated when it is applied to interdisciplinary research, where a key challenge is the integration of data and reusability of models initially created for a different purpose. Two distinctive areas of my research include data- and ontology-based knowledge negotiation and the creation of trust models for interdisciplinary teams. My work has been applied in the areas of Smart Cities and Water Sustainability
I lead the iLink Research Group at the Cyber-ShARE Center of Excellence at UTEP.

I was part of the Dumontier Lab - Semantic Web Group working under the supervision of Dr. Michel Dumontier. I have previously worked in the areas of Evolutionary Computation and other related AI areas.

Selected Publications


Journal papers

  • Peters, D. P.C., Havstad, K. M., Cushing, J., Tweedie, C. E., Fuentes, O., Villanueva-Rosales, N. Harnessing the power of big data: infusing the scientific method with machine learning to transform ecology. 2014. Ecosphere 5(6).
  • Dumontier, M., Baker, C., Baran, J., Callahan, A., Chepelev, L., Cruz-Toledo, J., Del Rio, N., Duck, G., Furlong, L., Keith, N., Klassen, D., McCusker, J., Queralt-Rosinach, N., Samwald, M., Villanueva-Rosales, N., Wilkinson, M., Hoehndorf, R. The Semanticscience Integrated Ontology (SIO) for Biomedical Research and Knowledge Discovery. 2014. Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 5(14). [Website]
  • M. Dumontier, L. Ferres, N. Villanueva-Rosales. "Modeling and Querying Graphical Representations of Statistical Data" 2009. Journal of Web Semantics. [Website]
  • M. Dumontier, N Villanueva-Rosales."Towards Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Discovery on the Semantic Web" 2009. Briefings in Bioinformatics. [Website]
  • N. Villanueva-Rosales and M. Dumontier. "yOWL: an Ontology-Driven Knowledge Base for Yeast Biologists" 2008. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. [Website]

Refereed conference/workshop papers

  • Mejia, D., Torres, E., Villanueva-Rosales, N., Cheu, K. (2017)Integrating Heterogeneous Freight Performance Data for Smart Mobility. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Smart City Innovations (IEEE SCI 2017). In press.
  • Villanueva-Rosales, N., Garnica-Chavira L., Larios V., Gomez L, Aceves E. 2016. Semantic-enhanced Living Labs for better interoperability of Smart Cities solutions. In: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Smart Cities (ISC2). Turin, Italy. [Website]
  • Larios, V. M., Gomez, L., Villanueva-Rosales, N., Mora, O. B., Maciel, R. 2016. Living labs for smart cities: A use case in Guadalajara city to foster innovation and develop citizen-centered solutions. In: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Smart Cities (ISC2). Turin, Italy. IEEE Xplore Digital LIbrary. [Website]
  • Villanueva-Rosales, N., Cheu, R., Gates, N., Rivera, N., Mondragon, O., Cabrera, S., Ferregut, C., Carrasco, C., Nazarian, S., Taboada, H., Larios V., Barbosa-Santillan, L. Svitek, O., Horak, T., Prochazkova, D. 2015. Collaborative, Interdisciplinary Initiative for a Smart Cities Innovation Network. In Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2). Guadalajara, Mexico. IEEE Xplore Digital Library. [Website]
  • Villanueva-Rosales, N., Del Rio, N., Pennington, D., Garnica Chavira, L. 2015. Semantic Bridges for Biodiversity Sciences. In Proceedings of the 14th International Semantic Web Conference, Bethelem, PA, USA. 9367:310-317. Springer International. Nominated to Best paper. [Website]
  • Villanueva-Rosales, N., Garnica Chavira, L., Del Rio, N., Pennington, D. 2015. eScience through the integration of data and models: a biodiversity scenario. 11th IEEE International Conference of eScience. 171-176. Munich, Germany. IEEE Computer Society. [Website]
  • Del Rio, N., Villanueva-Rosales, N., Pennington, D. , Benedict, K., Stewart, A., Grady, C.J. 2013. "ELSEWeb meets SADI: Supporting Data-to-Model Integration for Biodiversity Forecasting" 2013. AAAI Fall Symposium on Discovery Informatics. [PDF]
  • A. Gandara, N. Villanueva-Rosales. 2012. "Documenting and Sharing Scientific Research over the Semantic Web" International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies (i-KNOW'12). Graz, Austria. [Website]
  • N. Villanueva-Rosales, M. Dumontier. 2009. "Semi-automated Extraction of Biological Knowledge Bases using Semantic Web" 2nd Canadian Semantic Web Working Symposium (CSWWS09), Kelowna, Canada. [PDF]
  • M. Dumontier, L. Ferres, N. Villanueva-Rosales. 2008. "Semantic Annotation and Question Answering of Statistical Graphs" 7th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI 2008), Mexico City, Mexico. [Website]
  • N. Villanueva-Rosales. 2008. "Semi-automated Building of Semantic Web Knowledge Bases for Biological Research" 7th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI 2008) Doctoral Consortium, Mexico City, Mexico.[Website]
  • M. Dumontier and N. Villanueva-Rosales. 2008. "Modeling Life Science Knowledge with OWL 1.1" OWL Experiences and Design (OWLED-DC 2008), Washington DC, USA. [PDF]
  • M. Dumontier, M. Faizan, Joseph Obeng and N. Villanueva-Rosales. 2008. "Modeling the Pharmacogenomics of Depression with OWL 1.1" Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS 2008), colocated with World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008), Beijing, China.[PDF]
  • N. Villanueva-Rosales and M. Dumontier. 2007. "Three-Layer OWL Ontology Design". Second International Workshop on Modular Ontologies, Whistler, Canada. [PDF]
  • L. Ferres, M. Dumontier and N. Villanueva-Rosales. 2007. "Semantic Query Answering with Time-Series Graphs". The 3rd International Workshop on Vocabularies, Ontologies and Rules for The Enterprise (VORTE 2007), Annapolis, USA. [Website]
  • A. De Leon-Battista, N. Villanueva-Rosales, M. Palenychka, and M. Dumontier. 2007. "SMART: A Web-Based, Ontology-Driven, Semantic Web Query Answering Application". Semantic Web Challenge, International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007), Busan, South Korea. [PDF]
  • N. Villanueva-Rosales and M. Dumontier. 2007. "Describing chemical functional groups in OWL-DL for the classification of chemical compounds". OWL: Experiences and Directions (OWLED 2007), Innsbruck, Austria. [PDF]
  • N. Villanueva-Rosales, K. Osbahr and M. Dumontier. 2007. "Towards a Semantic Knowledge Base for Yeast Biologists". First International Workshop on Health Care and Life Sciences Data Integration for the Semantic Web (HCLS-DI 2007), colocated with World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007), Banff, Canada. [PDF]

natalia[at]natalia-villanueva.com