My research interests are centered around the technologies required to implement and deliver the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web - a web of data defined and linked in a machine-understandable way - is a vision which has been receiving much interest of late, both from those in the academic and business communities. In order to realise this vision, technologies which support the definition of, and reasoning about, metadata are key. Knowledge Representation Languages such as Description Logics (DLs) can be employed as a representation mechanism for semantic metadata. The use of KR provides a richer structure than existing approaches such as keywords, facilitating retrieval and annotation and supporting navigation through collections of documents.
The use of such languages comes at a price - tools are required for modellers and end users. My main interests lie in the development of tools and applications to support activities such as model building, querying and annotation and the deployment of reasoning services within the context of the Semantic Web. Although DLs are a logical framework with much interest from a theoretical point of view, I would strongly consider myself as a pragmatist - the only way to truly demonstrate the benefit of such an approach is through the construction of applications.
DLs should not be seen as a panacea, solving all of our problems in one fell swoop. Instead, DLs, and the classification reasoning services they provide should be seen as one of a number of possible services that will aid us in the delivery of the Semantic Web.
There's a wealth of information on current Description Logic research at the DL home page.
COHSE (Conceptual Open Hypermedia ServicE) is a system that supports the construction of hypertexts through the use of ontologies. The project was originally funded as an EPSRC grant in collaboration with the University of Southampton Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group. COHSE extending Southamton's Open Hypermedia System by enhancing the functionality of the Distributed Links Service. The project continues to run, now funded by a grant from Sun Microsystems. Software and publications relating to the project are available at the COHSE web site.
In collaboration with Simon Harper, we are investigating the use of Semantic Web technologies to improve accessibility of Web pages, in particular using semantic markup to provide information about the roles that page elements play in order to drive transcoding.
FaCT++ is a description logic reasoner developed in Manchester.
OWL, the Web Ontology Language, is the W3C's Recommendation for a knowledge representation language to be used on the Web. I was a member of WebOnt, the Working Group that produced the specification. Further information is available at our local OWL pages.
I was largely responsible for the development of the WonderWeb OWL API, Java infrastructure supporting parsing and manipulation of OWL documents.
OWL was heavily influenced by OIL and DAML+OIL. OIL, the Ontology Inference Layer, was an earlier proposal for a Semantic Web language. OIL combined the modelling primitives of frame languages with the reasoning power and well-defined semantics of a description logic. DAML+OIL was a synthesis of the OIL and related DAML activities.
I was responsible for the development of OilEd, an editor for Oil and DAML+OIL ontologies. A KI2001 paper provides some more detail, and there are further publications related to this work.
OilEd has largely been superceded by other tools and is now unmaintained.
I am involved with the European projects:
I have been involved with (now finished) European projects:
I have also worked on a number of other projects over the last few years.
Mike Doonesbury's experience with Search Engines.
Woods and Schmolze on users and systems.
My Erdös Number.
According to CiteSeer, I am now in the top 5,000 cited Computer Scientists. Fame at last!
Last modified: Wed Mar 20 14:37:24 GMT Standard Time 2002