Professor Ian Horrocks has been ranked as the number one author in the World Wide Web research domain by Microsoft Academic Search.

Microsoft Academic Search is a public search engine for academic papers and literature in the field of computer science, which is developed by Microsoft Research Asia. It covers a multitude of scientific papers, conferences, journals, and authors, mainly in computer science and related subjects, and is constantly growing and evolving.  

Uniquely, in Microsoft Academic Search, objects in the search results are sorted based on two factors: their relevance to the query and their global importance. The relevance score of an object is computed by its attributes; and the importance score of an object is calculated by its relationships with other objects. At the time of writing Ian is listed as top author in the World Wide Web field, with an impressive 302 publications and 9479 citations.

Ian Horrocks’s research focuses on knowledge representation, particularly ontology languages, description logics, and optimised reasoning algorithms. His work on tableau reasoning for very expressive description logics has formed the basis of most description logic reasoning systems in use today, including Racer, FaCT++ and Pellet. His achievements also include being jointly responsible for development of the OIL and DAML+OIL ontology languages, and he played a central role in developing the Web Ontology Language OWL.