Terry R. Payne is a computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Liverpool, working in the fields of artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and the semantic web. He completed a BSc at the University of Kent and earned an MSc and PhD in 1999 from the University of Aberdeen with the thesis "Dimensionality Reduction and Representation for Nearest Neighbour Learning" (EThOS record: uk.bl.ethos.301309). Payne has been affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southampton, and the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on the use of ontologies by software agents within decentralised environments, and he is best known for his work on Semantic Web Services, particularly OWL-S.

Dr Payne received his Undergraduate Degree (BSc) in Computer Systems Engineering from University of Kent in 1990, an MSc in Applied Artificial Intelligence from University of Aberdeen in 1994, followed by his PhD from the same institution for his work "Dimensionality Reduction and Representation for Nearest Neighbour Learning".^[2,1] Between 1998 and 2002, he worked with Katia Sycara as a Project Scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, before moving to the University of Southampton, and later joining the University of Liverpool in 2008.

He has been conducting research into the Semantic Web since 2000 and was one of the founding members of the OWL-S coalition, jointly responsible for developing the OWL-S ontology within the OWL-based framework of the Semantic Web, which supported the description of Semantic Web Services.^[4,3] Built on top of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) by the DARPA DAML program, the OWL-S ontology facilitates the discovery, invocation, composition, and monitoring of Web resources that offer services.^[5,6,7] He has also worked on various uses of decentralised knowledge negotiation in autonomous agent communities.^[8]