Dr. Heflin is a professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University where he is head of the Semantic Web and Agent Technologies (SWAT) lab.
His specific research interests include establishing semantic interoperability between heterogeneous information systems, scalable ontology reasoning, and developing formal theories of distributed ontology systems. He is one of the pioneers of Semantic Web research and wrote the first Ph.D. dissertation on the subject. He has been involved in the design of many important Semantic Web languages, including SHOE, DAML+OIL, and OWL. In 2004, he received an NSF CAREER award to study the theory and algorithms of distributed ontologies. His research group developed the Lehigh University Benchmark (LUBM), the de facto standard for evaluating the capabilities of large-scale Semantic Web Knowledge Bases.
His service includes the editorial board of the Journal of Web Semantics, guest editing for three journals, and serving on three ISWC organizing committees, most recently as co-program chair of ISWC 2012.