Ian Horrocks

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Ian Horrocks
FRS
Ian Horrocks mg 7439.jpg
Ian Horrocks
Born
Ian Robert Horrocks

(1958-03-11) 11 March 1958 (age 66) [1]
Liverpool
NationalityBritish
Alma mater University of Manchester (BSc, MSc, PhD)
Known for
Awards BCS Lovelace Medal (2020). [3] Roger Needham Award (2005) [4]
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Thesis Optimising tableaux decision procedures for description logics  (1997)
Website www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/ian.horrocks OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Ian Robert Horrocks FRS [6] is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. [7] His research [5] [8] [9] focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning, particularly ontology languages, [10] description logic and optimised tableaux decision procedures. [11] [12] [13]

Contents

Education

Horrocks completed his Bachelor of Science (BSc), Master of Science (MSc) [14] and PhD [15] degrees in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. [1]

Research and career

After several years as a lecturer, senior lecturer, reader then Professor in Manchester, Horrocks moved to the University of Oxford in 2008. His work on tableau reasoning for very expressive description logics has formed the basis of most description logic reasoning systems in use today, including Racer, FaCT++, [16] HermiT [17] [18] [19] and Pellet. [20]

Horrocks was jointly responsible for development of the OIL and DAML+OIL ontology languages, and he played a central role in the development of the Web Ontology Language (OWL). These languages and associated tools have been used by Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) [21] Consortium, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in America, the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [22] and a range of major corporations and government agencies. [6]

His research is partly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). [23]

Horrocks served as editor-in-chief of Journal of Web Semantics from 2012 [24] until late 2022. Together with the other editors-in-chief at the time, he resigned from his position at the Elsevier journal, and became editor-in-chief of the newly founded diamond open access journal Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge. [25] Horrocks also served as program chair of the 1st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in 2002 [26] and as the general chair of ISWC 2010. [27]

Awards and honours

In 2020 Horrocks was awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal in recognition of his significant contribution to the advancement of reasoning systems. [3]

Horrocks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2011 [6] and won the Roger Needham Award of the British Computer Society (BCS) in 2005. [4]

Oxford Semantic Technologies

In 2017 Horrocks co-founded the University spin-off Oxford Semantic Technologies Limited [28] with two of his colleagues; Bernardo Cuenca Grau and Boris Motik. [29]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semantic Web</span> Extension of the Web to facilitate data exchange

The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.

In information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definitions of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, or entities that pertain to one, many, or all domains of discourse. More simply, an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of terms and relational expressions that represent the entities in that subject area. The field which studies ontologies so conceived is sometimes referred to as applied ontology.

Description logics (DL) are a family of formal knowledge representation languages. Many DLs are more expressive than propositional logic but less expressive than first-order logic. In contrast to the latter, the core reasoning problems for DLs are (usually) decidable, and efficient decision procedures have been designed and implemented for these problems. There are general, spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal, and fuzzy description logics, and each description logic features a different balance between expressive power and reasoning complexity by supporting different sets of mathematical constructors.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for various domains: the nouns representing classes of objects and the verbs representing relations between the objects.

Patrick John Hayes is a British computer scientist who lives and works in the United States. He is a Senior Research Scientist Emeritus at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Florida.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semantic technology</span> Technology to help machines understand data

The ultimate goal of semantic technology is to help machines understand data. To enable the encoding of semantics with the data, well-known technologies are RDF and OWL. These technologies formally represent the meaning involved in information. For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships between things, and categories of things. These embedded semantics with the data offer significant advantages such as reasoning over data and dealing with heterogeneous data sources.

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The Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is a proposed language for the Semantic Web that can be used to express rules as well as logic, combining OWL DL or OWL Lite with a subset of the Rule Markup Language.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank van Harmelen</span>

Frank van Harmelen is a Dutch computer scientist and professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He was scientific director of the LarKC project (2008-2011), "aiming to develop the Large Knowledge Collider, a platform for very large scale semantic web reasoning."

A semantic reasoner, reasoning engine, rules engine, or simply a reasoner, is a piece of software able to infer logical consequences from a set of asserted facts or axioms. The notion of a semantic reasoner generalizes that of an inference engine, by providing a richer set of mechanisms to work with. The inference rules are commonly specified by means of an ontology language, and often a description logic language. Many reasoners use first-order predicate logic to perform reasoning; inference commonly proceeds by forward chaining and backward chaining. There are also examples of probabilistic reasoners, including non-axiomatic reasoning systems, and probabilistic logic networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ontology engineering</span> Field that studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies

In computer science, information science and systems engineering, ontology engineering is a field which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, which encompasses a representation, formal naming and definition of the categories, properties and relations between the concepts, data and entities of a given domain of interest. In a broader sense, this field also includes a knowledge construction of the domain using formal ontology representations such as OWL/RDF. A large-scale representation of abstract concepts such as actions, time, physical objects and beliefs would be an example of ontological engineering. Ontology engineering is one of the areas of applied ontology, and can be seen as an application of philosophical ontology. Core ideas and objectives of ontology engineering are also central in conceptual modeling.

Ontology engineering aims at making explicit the knowledge contained within software applications, and within enterprises and business procedures for a particular domain. Ontology engineering offers a direction towards solving the inter-operability problems brought about by semantic obstacles, i.e. the obstacles related to the definitions of business terms and software classes. Ontology engineering is a set of tasks related to the development of ontologies for a particular domain.

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References

  1. 1 2 Anon (2014). "Horrocks, Prof. Ian Robert" . Who's Who (online edition via Oxford University Press  ed.). A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U250633.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ↑ Grosof, B. N.; Horrocks, I.; Volz, R.; Decker, S. (2003). "Description logic programs". Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on World Wide Web – WWW '03. p. 48. doi:10.1145/775152.775160. ISBN   978-1581136807. S2CID   6381308.
  3. 1 2 "BCS Lovelace Medal 2020: Reasoning Systems | BCS". bcs.org. Retrieved 1 October 2021.
  4. 1 2 Professor Ian Horrocks, Roger Needham award winners, via the British Computer Society
  5. 1 2 Ian Horrocks publications indexed by Google Scholar OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  6. 1 2 3 Anon (2011). "Professor Ian Horrocks". royalsociety.org. Royal Society. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-11-11)
  7. ↑ www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/ian.horrocks OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  8. ↑ Ian Horrocks publications from Europe PubMed Central
  9. ↑ Ian Horrocks at DBLP Bibliography Server OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  10. ↑ Horrocks, I.; Patel-Schneider, Peter; van Harmelen, Frank (2003). "From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The making of a Web Ontology Language" (PDF). Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. 1: 7–26. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.2.7039 . doi:10.1016/j.websem.2003.07.001. S2CID   8277015.
  11. ↑ Ian Horrocks publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  12. ↑ Ian Horrocks author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
  13. ↑ Atzenbeck, C. (2009). "Interview with Ian Horrocks". ACM SIGWEB Newsletter. 2009: 1–4. doi:10.1145/1592394.1592396. S2CID   7868854.
  14. ↑ Horrocks, Ian Robert (1995). A comparison of two terminological knowledge representation systems (MSc thesis). University of Manchester. Archived from the original on 23 December 2012.
  15. ↑ Horrocks, Ian Robert (1997). Optimising tableaux decision procedures for description logics. manchester.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of Manchester. OCLC   644109415.
  16. ↑ Tsarkov, D.; Horrocks, I. (2006). "FaCT++ Description Logic Reasoner: System Description" (PDF). Automated Reasoning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 4130. pp. 292–297. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.65.2672 . doi:10.1007/11814771_26. ISBN   978-3-540-37187-8.
  17. ↑ "HermiT Reasoner: Home" . Retrieved 2 July 2011.
  18. ↑ B. Motik, R. Shearer and I. Horrocks (2009). "Hypertableau Reasoning for Description Logics" (PDF). Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. 36: 165–228. doi: 10.1613/jair.2811 . S2CID   190609.
  19. ↑ Motik, B.; Cuenca Grau, B.; Sattler, U. (2008). "Structured objects in owl: representation and reasoning" (PDF). Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web – WWW '08. p. 555. doi:10.1145/1367497.1367573. ISBN   9781605580852. S2CID   11221528.
  20. ↑ Sirin, E.; Parsia, B.; Grau, B. C.; Kalyanpur, A.; Katz, Y. (2007). "Pellet: A practical OWL-DL reasoner" (PDF). Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. 5 (2): 51–53. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2007.03.004. S2CID   101226. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 June 2007.
  21. ↑ Golbreich, C.; Horridge, M.; Horrocks, I.; Motik, B.; Shearer, R. (2007). "OBO and OWL: Leveraging Semantic Web Technologies for the Life Sciences" (PDF). The Semantic Web. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 4825. pp. 169–182. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-76298-0_13. ISBN   978-3-540-76297-3.
  22. ↑ Ian Horrocks introduction on the www-webont-wg mailing list at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
  23. ↑ UK Government research grants awarded to Ian Horrocks Archived 8 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine , via Research Councils UK
  24. ↑ "Ian Horrocks appointed editor in chief of the Journal of Web Semantics". blogspot.co.uk. 2012.
  25. ↑ Hogan, Aidan; Horrocks, Ian; Hotho, Andreas; Kagal, Lalana (December 2023). "Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge". Trans. Graph Data Knowl. 1 (1): 1:1–1:4. doi: 10.4230/TGDK.1.1.1 .
  26. ↑ Horrocks, Ian; Hendler, James, eds. (2002). "Front Matter". Proceedings of the 1st International Semantic Web Conference – ISWC '02. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 2342. Springer. doi:10.1007/3-540-48005-6. ISBN   3-540-43760-6. S2CID   27631564.
  27. ↑ International Semantic Web Conference 2010, Organization. Retrieved 4 May 2023.
  28. ↑ "Oxford Semantic Technologies Limited". oxfordsemantic.tech.
  29. ↑ Anon (2017). "Oxford Semantic Technologies Limited". gov.uk. London: Companies House. Archived from the original on 26 July 2023.


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