PhD and declarative modelling

This page summarises my former personal site (2011) about my early research. Back to Research.

The thesis

• Title: Le projet CordiFormes : une plate-forme pour la construction de modeleurs déclaratifs (The CordiFormes project: a platform for building declarative modellers).
• Setting: Doctoral school Engineering Sciences, Nantes; IRIN laboratory (later LINA, now LS2N), Université de Nantes.
• Supervisor: Michel Lucas.
• Jury: M. Lucas, J.-P. Dubois, Q. Péroche, B. Arnaldi, F. Hégron, O. Pacholczyk.
• Defence: 14 January 1998, highest honours, 285 pages.

Declarative modelling

Declarative modelling provides high-level tools to design scenes: the designer states the expected properties, and the system explores the space of possible scenes to keep those that match. The designer then only chooses among the solutions. The process has three steps: description, generation of valid solutions, and exploration of the results.

Projects

• CordiFormes: a platform for building declarative modellers, formalising the knowledge involved and offering generic tools.
• ChromoFormes: a declarative colour modeller, choosing a colour through properties rather than parameter values (RGB, HSL, colour charts).
• EngloFormes: a declarative modeller for bounding boxes of buildings or building parts, a special case of the VoluFormes project.