2005 Roger Needham memorial lecture

On 7th December 2005, Professor Ian Horrocks of Manchester University delivered the 2005 Roger Needham memorial lecture to a packed British Computer Society audience at the Royal Academy in London.  It was called...

"Ontologies and the Semantic Web"

Ian Horrocks has been a notable contributor to the development of ontology languages, which are formal ways of representing the structure of knowledge in various domains. Ontologies are increasingly being developed so that people working in complex domains of knowledge management can get effective help from machines in saerching for, organising and using information.

In particular, Ian participated in the development by the World Wide Web Consortium of "OWL" -- Web Ontology Langauge -- which is seen as an essential stepping-stone towards and building block of the Semantic Web.

Unfortunately, there just weren't enough places available at Ian's lecture, and many people had to be turned away. But now you can read a comprehensive illustrated account of the talk, expanded with some useful background information, notes, and
links to resources and examples of use.

Prepared from an audio recording and with reference to Ian's slides, the account of the lecture is available from the BCS EPSG website as a PDF document. To download it, please go to this URL: http://www.epsg.org.uk/pub/needham2005/

Conrad Taylor:  Information design & electronic publishing
Secretary, BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group (www.epsg.org.uk)

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