Network Inference Chief Scientist Recognized with Distinguished Industry Award.

CARLSBAD, Calif. -- Professor Ian Horrocks Honored with Microsoft-Sponsored Roger Needham Award By British Computer Society 

Network Inference Inc. congratulates its Chief Scientist Ian Horrocks on his well-deserved receipt of the highest accolade for professional achievement in IT from the British Computer Society -- the 2005 Microsoft-sponsored Roger Needham Award.

The award recognizes his work in developing techniques and technologies that are set to revolutionize the Web for society and for business. The 'Semantic Web' uses shared vocabularies (known as ontologies) that precisely specify meaning and can be understood by computers as well as by humans. Languages for building ontologies, and tools for automatically reasoning over ontology-based descriptions, are crucial to this endeavor. Consequently, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has standardized the Web Ontology Language (OWL), founded on the family of logics and reasoning techniques that Horrocks has been instrumental in developing.

David Clarke, Chief Executive of the BCS, commented that, "Ian's PhD changed the whole approach to optimized automated reasoning in expressive Description Logics. Before Ian made his contribution, expressive Description Logics were considered intractable and unscalable. But, by applying sound theoretical foundations, coupled with insightful software engineering, he demonstrated otherwise. All modern Description Logic reasoners are now based on algorithms developed by Ian and employ Ian's optimized implementation techniques."

John Kelly, CEO of Network Inference, said, "Network Inference's Cerebra products are based principally on Ian's research and the standards he was instrumental in developing. His breakthroughs in pragmatic, sound reasoning provide the correctness, scalability, performance and expressiveness required by our commercial and federal customers. Our engineering direction is heavily influenced by his vision and guidance. We are very pleased to see him recognized for his research contributions, which have benefited the standards community as well as the commercial enterprise."

About Network Inference

Network Inference is the leading provider of standards-based, enterprise-ready, semantic technologies. Network Inference solutions offer Global 2000 organizations lower maintenance costs and project risk, new integration and application capabilities, and provide a standards-driven pragmatic roadmap towards the model-driven Adaptive Enterprise. The Cerebra(R) Suite is an enterprise-strength, SOA-ready integration and application environment based on OWL, RDF, XML, SOAP, and WSDL standards. Corporate offices include Carlsbad, Menlo Park, Boston, and Manchester, UK. For more information, visit http://www.networkinference.com.

The Roger Needham award, part of the British Computer Society's remit to encourage and recognize personal endeavor in computer science, is sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge.