Since 2000, Frank has played a leading role in the development of the Semantic Web, which aims to make data on the web semantically interpretable by machines through formal knowledge representations. He was co-PI on the first European Semantic Web project (OnToKnowledge, 1999), which laid the foundations for the Web Ontology Language OWL. OWL has become a worldwide standard; it is in wide commercial use and has become the basis for an entire research community. He co-authored the “Semantic Web Primer”, the first academic textbook of the field, with over 10.000 copies sold of the English edition, and translated into 5 languages. Frank is one of the architects of Sesame, an RDF storage and retrieval engine, which is in wide academic and industrial use. This work received the 10-year impact award at the 2012 International Semantic Web Conference.
In later years (2010-2015), Frank pioneered the development of large-scale reasoning engines. He was scientific director of the EU-funded Large Knowledge Collider, a platform for distributed computation over semantic graphs with billions of edges. The prize-winning work with Jacopo Urbani improved the state of the art by two orders of magnitude.
