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New Year's honour for web science pioneer
Once and for Hall

By David Meyer

Published: Friday 02 January 2009

Web and multimedia research leader Professor Wendy Hall, of the University of Southampton, has been made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

The computer scientist, who was made a CBE in 2000, was awarded the honour for services to science and technology.

Along with Tim Berners-Lee, Hall has been one of the pioneering researchers of hypermedia, multimedia and web libraries since the 1980s, and continues to work prominently in the fields of the semantic web and web science. She was instrumental in the creation of the Microcosm hypermedia system, a forerunner of the world wide web.

Hall is the first non-American president of the Association for Computing Machinery and is a member of the prime minister's Council for Science and Technology. She is also a founding director of the Web Science Research Institute, alongside Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J Weitzner, and a founder member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. Her previous positions include the presidency of the British Computer Society (BCS) between 2003 and 2004.

The professor is also a fellow of the BCS, the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) and the City and Guilds, and holds five honorary degrees from around the world.

In November, Hall was one of three professors from the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science to be inducted into Europe's ICT 2008 Hall of Fame, the other two being Berners-Lee and fibre optic communications pioneer David Payne.