Tonight’s SWIG was a team presentation by Ian Horrocks and his research group who have moved from Manchester to Oxford universities this year. The problems they address – formal proofs of safety, modularity in ontologies, optimizing queries (by provably rewriting queries using a set of trees that represent the same relationships as the queries) – make them an interesting group.
What struck me about the work of this team is that they are tackling the important problems – the fact that in many instances the emperor has no clothes. The honest approach has no peers and will provide a breath of fresh air amongst the practitioners who struggle with making the best of the tools available. Having this talented team among us is a great boost, and should lead to some interesting pollenization between academia and industry – anybody want to license a codebase?
Schrödinger's Vet 