Ian Horrocks: "KR and the Semantic Web: What We Did Right (and Wrong)" (COST DKG Talk Series)
Channel: COST DKG
Date: 2023-05-17

Abstract: Augmenting the web to include some form of Knowledge Representation (KR) was one of the first directions for Semantic Web research and led to the development of the OWL KR language(s) and the SPARQL query language. In this talk I will recall the development of these languages and their genesis in foundational research, highlighting what I believe were the many good design decisions as well as a few not so good. I will then go on to  trace the development of KR systems and applications based on these technologies and argue that the this represents a significant success story for Semantic Web research.

Bio: Ian Horrocks is a full professor in the Oxford University Department of Computer Science, a visiting professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo and a co-founder of Oxford Semantic Technologies. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of Academia Europaea, a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and a British Computer Society Lovelace Medalist. His research concerns the representation of knowledge, and the efficient manipulation of such knowledge by computers. He played a leading role in establishing the Semantic Web as a significant research field, pioneering many of the underlying logics, algorithms, optimisation techniques, and reasoning systems. He has contributed to the development of several widely used reasoning systems including FaCT++, HermiT, Elk and RDFox. He has published more than 300 papers in major international conferences and journals, winning best paper prizes at KR-98, AAAI-2010, and IJCAI-2017, and test of time awards at ISWC-2013, KR-2020 and CADE-2021. He is one of the UK’s most highly cited computer scientists, with more than 59,000 citations, and an h-index of 99.