Professor Ian Horrocks FRS

Ian Horrocks is a world-leading computer scientist who focuses on knowledge representation and the semantic web. His work has been crucial for enhancing the ability of computers to use information to solve complex tasks and is revolutionising the Internet into a uniform web of data that computers and robots can understand.


Ian’s work forms the basis of ontology language standards — languages used by applications that need to process the web page’s content. These were previously considered inapplicable to large-scale problems, until Ian proved otherwise. His standards have been adopted by organisations including the Open Biomedical Ontologies Consortium, the US National Cancer Institute and the World Wide Web Consortium.


He is currently Professor of Computer Science and Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford. He has published hundreds of publications throughout his career and received the BCS Roger Needham Award in 2005. Furthermore, Ian is the current Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Web Semantics.

Professional position

  • Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
  • Professor, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo

Subject groups

  • Computer Sciences

    Computer science (excl engineering aspects), Artificial intelligence, machine learning, vision

  • Engineering and Materials Science

    Computer engineering (including software)

Committees Participated Role
Sectional Committee 0: Computer sciences October 2022 - September 2025 Member
Sectional Committee 4: Engineering and Materials Science December 2012 - November 2015 Member
Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Sr. R'search F'ship Panel January 2012 - December 2014 Member