| Citation | Ian Horrocks is distinguished for his world-leading contribution to knowledge representation and the Semantic Web - the next significant advance in technology for the Worldwide Web that enables the automated extraction of structured information from diverse web sources. His work has had a profound influence on the development of the Semantic Web and also forms the basis of ontology language standards adopted by (inter alia) the Open Biomedical Ontologies Consortium, the US National Cancer Institute, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Wide Web Consortium, and a wide range of major corporations and US government agencies. These language standards are based on expressive Description Logics, which were considered intractable and inapplicable to large-scale problems before Ian proved otherwise through the application of sound theoretical foundations and sophisticated software engineering methods. All modern Description Logic reasoners (including commercial systems) are based on his algorithms and implementation techniques. |