OWL: a Reasonable Ontology Language?

Tuesday, 17th August, 2010, Room 3.2.14

Abstract: The design of OWL was heavily influenced by description logics. One motivation for this was to enable the use of description logic inspired reasoning systems in OWL applications. In the more than six years since the publication of the standard, OWL has become a mainstream technology that is supported by major technology vendors and has been deployed in a wide range of applications. In this talk I will review our experience with OWL, consider the extent to which it has satisfied application requirements, and in particular examine both the usefulness and feasibility of OWL reasoning in practice.

Short bio

Ian Horrocks is a Professor in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory where he jointly (with Georg Gottlob) leads the Information Systems Group.  His research interests include description logics, ontology languages, and reasoning systems. He was centrally involved in the development of the OIL, DAML+OIL and OWL ontology languages, and was co-chair of the W3C Working Group that recently developed OWL 2. He also developed algorithms and implementation techniques that are employed in many reasoning systems. He has published more than 150 articles in conferences, journals and books. He is a BCS Fellow, an ECCAI Fellow, an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow and a past winner of the BCS Roger Needham award.