Personal Chair: Henry S Thompson

Professor Henry S Thompson has been made Personal Chair in Web Informatics.

He is Professor of Web Informatics at the School of Informatics, based in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation.

He is also an independent consultant on XML-related business strategy.

He received an MSc in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and then his PhD, in Linguistics, in 1980.

Professor Thompson’s research interests have ranged widely. They include natural language parsing, modeling human lexical access mechanisms, the fine structure of human-human dialogue and architectures for linguistic annotation. He remains convinced of the original interdisciplinary vision of cognitive science.

He was a member of the Standard Generalised Markup Language Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It designed XML, a major contributor to the core concepts of XSLT and W3C XML Schema. He has been elected four times to the W3C Technical Architecture Group.

His current research is focused on the semantics of markup, XML pipelines and more generally understanding and articulating the architectures of the web. His insights from linguistics and philosophy as well as computer science are brought to bear on this work.