Jonathan Bowen
Museophile: Online Museum Accessibility, E-Commerce, and Forums
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Professor Jonathan Bowen, will talk about Museophile: Online Museum Accessibility, E-Commerce, and Forums. Large national museums can afford to create their own online communication services and to undertake e-commerce activities themselves. However, for other museums, such facilities can be a daunting prospect, both technically and financially. It is also likely to be much less effective. A solution could be to create an on-line museum community of small to medium sized museums who alone would struggle to make such an enterprise a success but who together, with suitable help, could rival the efforts of national museums. This talk examines the background to and activities of a London South Bank University spin out company, Museophile Limited, established in 2002 to support museums online in areas such as disabled access, collaborative e-commerce and discussion forums. Some issues and examples in these areas will be presented and discussed. The work has been supported by LSBU Business Award & Support Scheme funding.

Jonathan Bowen is Professor of Computing at London South Bank University where he heads the Center for Applied Formal Methods. From 1995 to March 2000, Bowen was a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, The University of Reading, where he led the Formal Methods and Software Engineering Group. Previously he was a senior researcher at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory Programming Research Group where he worked under the guidance of Sir Tony Hoare, FRS. Between 1979 and 1984 he worked at Imperial College, London as a research assistant, latterly in the interdepartmental Wolfson Microprocessor Laboratory. He has been involved with the field of computing in both industry (including Marconi Instruments, Logica and Silicon Graphics Inc.) and academia since 1977. His interests include formal methods, safety-critical systems, the Z notation, provably correct systems, rapid prototyping using logic programming, decompilation, hardware compilation, software/hardware co-design, the history of computing and on-line museums. He holds an MA degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University.

Bowen won the 1994 IEE Charles Babbage Premium award and managed the ESPRIT ProCoS-WG Working Group of 25 European partners (1993-1997) on Provably Correct Systems. He has produced over 230 publications including 13 books, and has served on about 50 programme committees. He is the Chairman of the Z User Group and a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM. In 1997, he was Conference Chair of the 10th International Conference of Z Users (ZUM'97, University of Reading, UK), Honorary Chair, workshop presenter and invited speaker at the 1st Museums and the Web Conference (MW97, Los Angeles, USA) and an invited speaker at the 3rd International Conference on Reliability, Quality and Safety of Software-Intensive Systems (ENCRESS'97, Athens, Greece).

In February 1999 he gave invited talks at the Institute of Systems & Information Technologies (ISIT), Kyushu, Japan and was the keynote speaker at the 2nd Joint Workshop on Systems Development, Cheju, Korea. During the summer of 1999 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology (UNU/IIST), Macau. In September 1999 he was the Publicity Chair of the World Congress on Formal Methods (FM'99, Toulouse, France), attracting over 500 delegates, the largest formal methods conference ever held. He also produced two books in 1999 on High-Integrity System Specification and Design and Industrial-Strength Formal Methods in Practice, both in the Springer-Verlag Formal Approaches to Computing and Information Technology (FACIT) series.

During 1999-2000 he guest edited two special issues of the Museum International Journal on Museums and the Internet. He also contributes an Internet column to the magazine New Heritage. He joined the School of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics (SCISM) at London South Bank University as Professor of Computing in March 2000. During 2001 he received the Freedom of The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, the 100th Livery Company in the City of London. In 2002, Bowen was elected Chair of the British Computer Society FACS Specialist Group on Formal Aspects of Computing Science and Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. At the EVA 2003 London conference, Bowen was the keynote speaker on Web Access to Cultural Heritage for the Disabled.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Mike Hinchey