Ian Horrocks

For the British Royal Air Force helicopter pilot, see Ian Horrocks (RAF officer).

Ian Horrocks FRS
Ian Horrocks
Born	Ian Robert Horrocks (1958-03-11) 11 March 1958 (age 66)[4] Liverpool
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Manchester (BSc, MSc, PhD)
Known for	Description Logic[5] Web Ontology Language
Awards	BCS Lovelace Medal (2020).[1] Roger Needham Award (2005)[2]
Scientific career
Fields	Semantic Web Ontologies Knowledge Representation Artificial intelligence Logic in computer science[3]
Institutions	University of Oxford Oriel College, Oxford University of Manchester
Thesis	Optimising tableaux decision procedures for description logics (1997)
Website	www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/ian.horrocks

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^[3][8][9] focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning, particularly ontology languages,^[10] description logic and optimised tableaux decision procedures.^[11][12][13]

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.^[4]

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.^[1]

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.^[2]

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]

References

1. "BCS Lovelace Medal 2020: Reasoning Systems | BCS". bcs.org. Retrieved 1 October 2021.
2. Professor Ian Horrocks, Roger Needham award winners, via the British Computer Society
3. Ian Horrocks publications indexed by Google Scholar
4. 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.)
5. 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.
6. 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
8. Ian Horrocks publications from Europe PubMed Central
9. Ian Horrocks at DBLP Bibliography Server
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.