Sean Bechhofer

I am a Professor in the Department of Computer Science.

I am now focused on Teaching and Scholarship: my research interests were broadly in the area of Semantic Web, in particular ontologies, vocabularies and the languages used to represent them. I was a member of the Information Management Group. 

Originally hailing from Edinburgh, I graduated in 1988 with a Mathematics degree from the University of Bristol, and came to Manchester to do post-graduate work on various topics including Category Theory, Type Theory and Logic. In 1992 I went to work at ICL West Gorton on a Teaching Company Scheme. The project was concerned with developing an object-oriented front end to a network database-based software development environment, and made strong use of the O-O language Eiffel. In November 1993 I joined the Medical Informatics Group (MIG), and became part of the IMG in 1997.

Between 1993 and 2004 I was a Research Associate, working on a number of European and National projects including COHSE, WonderWeb, OntoWeb and KnowledgeWeb. 

In 2004 I was appointed a Lecturer in the School of Computer Science.

I currently teach the following course units

• COMP15212 Operating Systems
• COMP11012 Computational Thinking
• COMP26120 Algorithms and Data Structures

In the past I have taught units on Fundamentals of Computation, Ontology Engineering for the Semantic Web, Knowledge Representation and Conceptual Modelling, and Object Oriented Programming with Java.

I have also developed and delivered tutorials on Description Logics, Ontology Engineering, and Knowledge Representation Languages at International Conferences and Summer Schools.

I was Discipline Head of Education for Computer Science from 2019 until the end of 2023.