Patrick J. Hayes
Patrick J. Hayes researches knowledge representation, automated reasoning and the foundations of AI. He studied mathematics at Cambridge, earned an AI doctorate at Edinburgh and conducted research across academic and industrial institutions. His earlier work includes formal representations of action, time and geographic concepts. He edited the 2004 W3C RDF Semantics recommendation, which specifies meaning and inference rules for RDF and RDF Schema. He also participated in Semantic Web standards work on OWL and SPARQL.
- Works
- 126
- Citations
- 8,674
- h-index
- 34
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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As of October 2026
Mathematics, AI and research settings
Hayes earned a Cambridge mathematics degree and an Edinburgh AI doctorate. He also held academic appointments and conducted applied AI research at Xerox PARC, SRI and Schlumberger.
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1995
Formal theories of time
Hayes’s 1995 work includes A Catalog of Temporal Theories. The work integrates point-based and interval-based temporal logic to represent actions and processes, separating deductions about a model from predictions about changing conditions.
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1997
Qualitative geographic reasoning
In May 1997, Hayes began a project to formalize qualitative spatial and temporal concepts used in geographic thinking. The project aimed to build a knowledge base that could support checks of geographic consistency.
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2004
Precise meaning for RDF
Patrick Hayes edited the W3C recommendation dated 10 February 2004. It specifies semantics and inference rules for RDF and RDF Schema, providing a formal basis for reasoning about structured Web data. The recommendation resulted from a collaborative standards process.
Sources and credits
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