PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Boris Motik

Boris Motik is an Oxford computer scientist whose AI work develops formal reasoners and knowledge-graph systems. He studies at the University of Zagreb, completes a PhD at Karlsruhe, and develops HermiT and RDFox, systems for reasoning over structured knowledge and data. He co-founds Oxford Semantic Technologies in 2017; Samsung acquires the company in 2024, and he receives Oxford's 2025 innovation award as the paper RDFox: A Highly-Scalable RDF Store wins a SWSA Ten-Year Award. As of October 2026, he is Professor of Computer Science at Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, where his research includes Datalog and data management.

Now at
Somerville College, University of Oxford
Badges

Timeline

  1. 1999

    Degrees at Zagreb

    He studies for undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Zagreb. His 1999 master’s thesis at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing is titled Improving Interaction with the Information Infrastructure Using Intelligent Agents.

  2. 2006

    A PhD in Karlsruhe

    He completes his PhD in Karlsruhe in 2006, researching scalable reasoning for ontology languages. His algorithms lead to the KAON2 reasoner and support commercial ontology management. After the doctorate, he takes a postdoc at the University of Manchester before moving to Oxford.

  3. 2007

    The Cor Baayen Award

    He receives the 2007 Cor Baayen Award for work on reasoning algorithms and systems for Description Logics, a foundation of the Web Ontology Language.

  4. 2008

    The HermiT reasoner

    In 2008, he coauthors HermiT: A Highly-Efficient OWL Reasoner. The system uses a hypertableau calculus to process large life-science terminologies.

  5. 2013

    The Roger Needham Award

    He receives the 2013 BCS Roger Needham Award for contributions to OWL 2 standardisation and techniques for intelligent management of large data sets.

  6. 2015

    RDFox as an RDF store

    He coauthors the 2015 paper RDFox: A Highly-Scalable RDF Store. RDFox combines data sources into machine-readable knowledge and lets users query them with reasoning.

  7. 2017

    Co-founding Oxford Semantic Technologies

    With Ian Horrocks and Bernardo Cuenca Grau, he co-founds Oxford Semantic Technologies in 2017 to commercialise their knowledge-representation and reasoning research. RDFox is the spinout’s main product.

  8. 2024

    Samsung acquires Oxford Semantic Technologies

    In July 2024, Samsung acquires Oxford Semantic Technologies and plans to integrate RDFox into phones, televisions, and home appliances. The company applies knowledge representation and reasoning, an AI approach that uses data and expert knowledge to support accurate, explainable decisions.

  9. 2025

    Awards for RDFox and OST

    In 2025, the SWSA Ten-Year Award goes to RDFox, his paper with Yavor Nenov, Robert Piro, Ian Horrocks, Zhe Wu, and Jay Banerjee. He also wins Oxford’s 2025 Vice Chancellor’s Award for Innovation and Commercialisation for his work on the spinout.

  10. As of October 2026

    Professor at Oxford

    As of October 2026, he is Professor of Computer Science at Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College. His current work investigates Datalog variants for data management and develops algorithms for Semantic Web applications.

Career

  1. NowUniversity of OxfordProfessor of Computer Science
  2. NowSomerville College, University of OxfordSenior Research Fellow
  3. From 2017Oxford Semantic TechnologiesCo-founder
  4. University of ManchesterPostdoc

Education

  1. 2006University of KarlsruhePhD
  2. University of ZagrebUndergraduate degree
  3. University of ZagrebMaster's degree

From the biography.

Checked career sources: oxfordsemantic.tech, cs.ox.ac.uk, ercim.eu, cs.ox.ac.uk.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Meet the Founders: Prof. Boris Motik oxfordsemantic.tech. Checked 26 October 2026.
  2. Publications by Boris Motik cs.ox.ac.uk. Checked 26 October 2026.
  3. Cor Baayen Award 2007 for Boris Motik ercim.eu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  4. Boris Motik | Department of Computer Science cs.ox.ac.uk. Checked 26 October 2026.
  5. Clean sweep for Oxford at BCS annual awards cs.ox.ac.uk. Checked 26 October 2026.
  6. Samsung invests in spinout company Oxford Semantic Technologies cs.ox.ac.uk. Checked 26 October 2026.
  7. Department of Computer Science spin-out company acquired by Samsung cs.ox.ac.uk. Checked 26 October 2026.
  8. Somerville Fellow’s Technology Spinout Company Bought by Samsung some.ox.ac.uk. Checked 26 October 2026.
  9. SWSA Ten-Year Award - Semantic Web Science Association swsa.semanticweb.org. Checked 26 October 2026.