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. 

I've been a member of academic staff in the Department of Computer Science since 2004, having previously been employed as a Research Associate between 1993 and 2004. My focus is now on Teaching, but up until 2017 I was actively involved in Semantic Web research where my activities fell under the broad umbrella of developing semantic web middleware and infrastructure, in particular working with OWL and SKOS.

I have played several administrative roles in the Department including Year Tutor, Director of Teaching and Learning, and Discipline Head of Education.

I originally hail from Edinburgh and graduated in 1988 with a Mathematics degree from the University of Bristol. I also spent a brief period at ICL in 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. 

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.