Frank van Harmelen (born 1960) is a Dutch

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

and

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department at the

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research ...

. He was scientific director of the LarKC project (2008-2011), "aiming to develop the Large Knowledge Collider, a platform for very large scale semantic web reasoning."Homepage of Frank van Harmelen
at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Retrieved 6 October 2008.

Biography

After studying mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam, Van Harmelen moved to the Department of AI of the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

, where he was awarded a PhD in 1989 for his research on meta-level reasoning. While in Edinburgh, he "co-developed a logic-based toolkit for expert systems, and worked with

Alan Bundy Alan Richard Bundy is a professor at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh,http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/bundy/ Professor Alan Bundy's website known for his contributions to automated reasoning, especially to proof planning ...

on proof planning for inductive theorem proving". After his PhD research, he moved back to

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...

where he worked from 1990 to 1995 in the SWI Department under Professor Bob Wielinga, on the use of reflection in

expert systems In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if� ...

, on the formal underpinnings of the CommonKADS methodology for Knowledge-Based Systems. In 1995 he joined the AI research group at the

, where he co-lead the On-To-Knowledge project, one of the first Semantic Web projects. He was appointed full professor in 2002, and is leading the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group. Currently he is scientific director the LarKC project aiming to develop the Large Knowledge Collider, a platform for very large scale semantic web reasoning. Van Harmelen was elected a member of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...

in 2017. In 2019, Van Harmelen received a Zwaartekracht grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science for The Hybrid Intelligence Center

Work

Van Harmelen's research interests include

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

knowledge representation Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...

and the semantic web, approximate reasoning and Medical Protocols. He was one of the co-designers of the

Web Ontology Language The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for variou ...

(OWL) and the

Ontology Inference Layer OIL (Ontology Inference Layer or Ontology Interchange Language) can be regarded as an ontology infrastructure for the Semantic Web. OIL is based on concepts developed in Description Logic (DL) and frame-based systems and is compatible with RDFS ...

(OIL), and has published books on meta-level inference, on knowledge-based systems, and on the Semantic Web.

Publications

Van Harmelen has published several books and over 100 research papers, Books: * 1989. ''Logic-Based Knowledge Representation''. With P. Jackson and H. Reichgelt. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989. . * 1991. ''Meta-level Inference Systems F. van Harmelen. Research Notes in AI.'' Pitmann, Morgan Kaufmann, London, San Mateo, California, 1991. * 2003. ''Towards the semantic web: ontology-driven knowledge management'' With John Davies and Dieter Fensel (eds.) John Wiley & Sons, 2002, * 2004. ''A Semantic Web Primer (Cooperative Information Systems)''. With Grigoris Antoniou. MIT Press. * 2004. ''Information Sharing on the Semantic Web''. With Heiner Stuckenschmidt. Springer. * 2008. ''Handbook of Knowledge Representation''. With V. Lifschitz and B. Porter, Elsevier, 2008. . Articles, a selection: * * * * * * * *

References

External links

An interview with Frank van Harmelen about the Semantic Web

Blog written by Frank van Harmelen
{{DEFAULTSORT:Harmelen, Frank Van 1960 births Living people Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Artificial intelligence researchers Dutch computer scientists Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Semantic Web people Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam alumni Academic staff of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam