The virtual museum

Jonathan Bowen is considered by many as the ‘founding father’ of the Virtual Library museums pages, one of the premier Internet sites in the museum field. He is a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, University of Reading (United Kingdom), where he leads the Formal Methods and Software Engineering Group, and was previously a senior researcher at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. He has worked in the field of computing in both industry and academia since 1977 and has served on more than fifteen programme committees including a major working group within the European Union information technologies programme, ESPRIT. The author of 140 publications including nine books, Jonathan Bowen won the 1994 IEE (Institution of Electrical Engineers) Charles Babbage Premium award. In 1997 he was honorary chair, workshop presenter and an invited speaker at the first ‘Museums and the Web’ conference and has been an active participant in subsequent conferences.