Maxime Lefrançois
Portrait of Maxime Lefrançois

Maxime Lefrançois

Associate Professor at Mines Saint-Étienne, Institut Mines-Télécom
Member of LIMOS, UMR CNRS 6158

How can knowledge engineering support semantic interoperability between intelligent systems?

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About

I work on knowledge representation and ontology engineering, and on how they let devices, buildings, energy systems and data spaces understand each other.

Since 2016 I have contributed to ETSI SAREF, the Smart Applications REFerence ontology, first in ETSI TC SmartM2M and now in TC DATA. I led three ETSI Specialist Task Forces (556, 578 and 653), and I develop the SAREF development framework, its public portal and its quality-checking pipeline. I co-edited the OGC & W3C Semantic Sensor Network ontology and co-chaired the W3C Linked Building Data community group (2018–2021).

At Mines Saint-Étienne I head the computer science major of the Ingénieur civil des mines programme and co-coordinate the CPS2 master's track, which becomes DAKAI in 2027. I am preparing my habilitation (HDR) at Université Jean Monnet.

I studied at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (agrégation in mechanical engineering, 2008), hold master's degrees in signal processing (Grenoble INP, 2009) and computer science (Université Grenoble 2, 2010), and received my PhD in 2014 from Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (Inria, Wimmics team) for a knowledge representation of Meaning-Text Theory lexical semantics.

Current work

  1. 2026–2031
    EDIS, a project of the PEPR MOBIDEC (France 2030): Semantic Web and agentic AI for open research data on electromobility. Local contact for Mines Saint-Étienne, task leader, PhD co-supervision.
  2. 2026
    SAREF-AI-SCALE (ETSI STF 702): advancing SAREF by scaling up adoption, fostering collaboration, and using AI in the standardisation process. I contributed to the proposal, and Mines Saint-Étienne has a share of the funding, from the EU Single Market Programme.
  3. 2025–
    Contributions to European standards in ETSI TC DATA: the revision of EN 303 760 (SAREF guidelines), and EN 304 199, the data catalogue implementation framework for data spaces. Also a proposal for a task force on the alignment of SAREF and NGSI-LD.
  4. 2027
    DAKAI, Data, Agents, Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence: the new master's track of Université Jean Monnet and Mines Saint-Étienne, successor of CPS2. I prepare the curriculum and the accreditation file.

All projects, supervision and service →

Selected work

  • ETSI SAREF

    The Smart Applications REFerence ontology and its extensions, with the development framework, public portal and SAREF-Pipeline quality checker.

    ETSI TS 103 264 · EN 303 760

  • Semantic Sensor Network ontology

    The OGC & W3C SOSA/SSN ontology for sensors, observations, samples and actuators. Co-editor of the 2017 recommendation and of the 2023 edition.

    W3C Recommendation

  • SPARQL-Generate

    An extension of SPARQL 1.1 that generates RDF or text from documents in heterogeneous formats: JSON, CSV, XML, CBOR, HTML and more.

    Open source · Apache Jena

  • SEAS ontology

    A modular, versioned OWL 2 DL ontology for smart energy systems (more than 30 modules). Its patterns were taken up in SAREF and SAREF4SYST.

    ITEA SEAS

  • linked-data-python

    Python with the Semantic Web in its syntax: IRIs, RDF literals and Turtle graphs are expressions of the language, transpiled to plain Python on rdflib. With urdflib, RDF on MicroPython devices.

    Open source · VS Code extension

  • Lindt and cdt:ucum

    Custom datatypes in RDF and SPARQL, including quantities with units of measure, implemented for Apache Jena.

    Linked datatypes

Contact

maxime.lefrancois@emse.fr · +33 4 77 42 66 40

Mines Saint-Étienne, Institut Henri Fayol
158 cours Fauriel, CS 62362
42023 Saint-Étienne Cedex 2, France