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.