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prof. dr. Frank van Harmelen

Full Professor, Faculty of Science, Artificial intelligence

Full Professor, Network Institute

Full Professor, Research Programmes - Science, Learning and Reasoning

Personal information

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.

Research

In recent years (2017-current), the research of his group has turned towards neuro-symbolic AI: combining Knowledge Representation with Machine Learning, in both directions: using knowledge graphs to make machine learning more data efficient and more explainable; and using machine learning to improve the completeness of these knowledge graphs. His group gave a definitive account of the use of fuzzy logic operators for machine learning (AI Journal, 130 citations in the two years since publication). They also proposed a graphical notation to describe the architecture of a large variety of neuro-symbolic systems. This notation has been adopted by a group in Vienna for a systematic literature review of 300 neuro-symbolic systems (published in ACM Computing Reviews), it has been used as the organizing principle for a recently published compendium of neuro-symbolic systems (IOS Press), by researchers in Zurich for a book on applications of neuro-symbolic systems (Springer), and by researchers in Hannover to build a graphical editor that verifies syntactic and semantic constraints on neuro-symbolic architectures.

Since 2020 Frank is the principal investigator of the 10 year, 20m€ Dutch national Gravitation grant on Hybrid Intelligence, studying AI systems that collaborate with people instead of replacing them. The first cohort of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre employed 30 PhD students across 7 Dutch universities, with an equal number of staff members involved in supervision. A further 20 PhD students have recently started in a second cohort.

Ancillary activities

Wuhan University of Science and Technology | Wuhan | Bijzonder Hoogleraar | 2014-10-01 - present
Fondatione Bruno Kessler (FBK) | Trento | Adviseur | 2025-06-01 - 2026-12-31

Ancillary activities are updated daily