Ian Horrocks


Ian Robert Horrocks is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His research focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning, particularly ontology languages, description logic and optimised tableaux decision procedures.

Education

Horrocks completed his Bachelor of Science, Master of Science and PhD degrees in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.

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++, HermiT and Pellet.
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. These languages and associated tools have been used by Open Biomedical Ontologies Consortium, the National Cancer Institute in America, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Wide Web Consortium and a range of major corporations and government agencies.
His research is partly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Horrocks is the current Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Web Semantics and has served as program chair for the International Semantic Web Conference.

Awards and honours

Horrocks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011 and won the Roger Needham Award of the British Computer Society in 2005.