sergio

My name is Sergio Fernández (aka wikier/willy). I'm a Spanish software engineer, based in Vancouver (Canada), advocate of open technologies and ways of thinking.

I like to say that I am I and my circumstances. So welcome to my personal web page!

As mentioned, I'm a Software engineer with wide experience productionizing and scalling smart software systems that combine different technologies (Information Retrieval, Semantic Web, Machine Learning or Big Data, among others). Currently I'm applying all my engineering expertise to a larger scale at Amazon, the Earth's most customer-centric company.

In the past I've worked at some of the finest applied research institutes in Europe: more than six years as research assistant at CTIC (Spain), visiting DERI (Ireland) in 2008, and as a Senior Researcher at Salzburg Research in Austria in 2012. Contributing in this time as expert in numerous large-scale European research projects and standardization bodies such as the W3C. After that I tried to bring some of those results to the market as co-founder of a startup in Austria: Redlink.

Since my time in college, I have always been passionate about open software technologies, free software or open source, the way you prefer to call it. Long gone are the days of AsturLiNUX when we wanted to change the world from a modest LUG. But the spirit remains. So it is no surprise that most of my development work is available in several open source projects, and especially at the Apache Software Foundation, of which I'm Member.

My other passion remains teaching. So whenever I have the chance I love to organize talks, workshops or meetups to share ideas and simply talk tech. I have also been sporadically lecturing at universities and other education centers.

Disclaimer: this is my personal website, so all the opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of current or past employers.

blog rss

Ocasionally I write in a blog those writing I find interesting to share. But I don't keep it as updated as I used to do, so you can refer to my twitter to get freshest information.

recent entries

publications

Although Google Scholar does a great work gathering my publications, here I manually maintain a list with all of them:

2016

2015

2014

2012

2011

  • Alexandre Passant, Sergio Fernández, John Breslin, and Uldis Bojars. Proceedings of the ISWC2011 workshop Social Data on the Web 2011 (SDoW2011), Bonn (Germany), October 23, 2011.
  • Carlos Tejo-Alonso, Diego Berrueta, Luis Polo and Sergio Fernández. Metadata for web ontologies and rules: current practices and perspectives. Proceedings of the Fifth Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR 2011), pages 57-67, İzmir (Turkey), October 12-14, 2011.

2010

  • Alexandre Passant, John Breslin, Sergio Fernández, Uldis Bojars (eds.): Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Social Data on the Web Workshop (SDoW2010), Shanghai (China), November 8, 2010. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073.
  • Thomas Eiter, Adil El Ghali, Sergio Fernández, Stijn Heymans, Thomas Krennwallner, François Lévy (eds.): Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Business Models, Business Rules and Ontologies (BuRO 2010), co-located with the 4th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR2010), Bressanone/Brixen (Italy), September 21, 2010.
  • Sergio Fernández. TRIOO, estudio e implementación de modelos de datos RDF en lenguajes orientados a objetos . Master degree thesis, Web Engineering, University of Oviedo, July 28, 2010.
  • Sergio Fernández, Diego Berrueta, Miguel García Rodríguez, Jose E. Labra. TRIOO, Keeping the Semantics of Data Safe and Sound into Object-Oriented Software. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2010), Athens, Greece, July 22-24, 2010.
  • Carlos Tejo-Alonso, Sergio Fernández, Diego Berrueta, Luis Polo, María Jesús Fernández, and Victor Morlan. eZaragoza, a tourist promotional mashup. Submission to the AI Mashup Challenge 2010, co-located with the 7th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2010), Heraklion, Greece, 30 May - 3 June, 2010.
  • Lian Shi, Diego Berrueta, Sergio Fernández, Luis Polo, Iván Minguez, Emilio Rubiera and Silvino Fernández. GEEK: Analyzing Online Communities for Expertise Information. Chapter in Handbook of Research on Methods and Techniques for Studying Virtual Communities/on line communities: Paradigms and Phenomena, Ben Kei Daniel (ed.). Scheduled for publication in 2010 by IGI Global.

2009

  • John Breslin, Uldis Bojars, Alexandre Passant and Sergio Fernández (eds.). Proceedings of the ISWC2009 workshop on Social Data on the Web (SDoW2009), Washington DC (USA), October 25, 2009.
  • Sergio Fernández, Diego Berrueta, Lian Shi, Jose E. Labra, Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos. Mailing Lists and Social Semantic Web. Chapter in Social Web Evolution: Integrating Semantic Applications and Web 2.0 Technologies, Miltiadis D. Lytras, Patricia Ordonez de Pablos (eds.), part of the Advances in Semantic Web and Information Systems (ASWIS) book series. ISBN: 978-1-60566-272-5.
  • John Breslin, Uldis Bojars, Alexandre Passant, Sergio Fernández and Stefan Decker. SIOC: Content Exchange and Semantic Interoperability Between Social Networks. W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, Barcelona, Spain, 15-16 January, 2009.

2008

2007

2006

projects

Due my research activities, I participated in large-scale European research projects as well as in W3C standarization groups. But this list doesn't refer to those projects, but software projects I developed, of course pretty related with my research. You can check at ohloh some of my contributions to other open source projects.

current projects

Apache Commons RDF
Apache Commons RDF aims to provide a type-safe, non-general API that covers RDF 1.1, providing a library that could be implemented by the upcoming versions of the main Java toolkits (Jena and Sesame) as well of other JVM languages.
Apache Marmotta
An Open Platform for Linked Data. At the end of 2012 we proposed to the ASF the incubation of this project based on part of LMF.
RDFLib
RDFLib is a Python library for working with RDF. I contribute to it mainly with the development of the SPARQL Wrapper.
jip
A Java dependency management tool for Jython.

past projects

OpenRefine
OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) is a powerful tool for working with messy tabular data, cleaning it, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and interlink with other datasets.
Apache Stanbol
Apache Stanbol provides a set of reusable components for semantic content management.
LMF
The Linked Media Framework is a server application that bundles central Semantic Web technologies to offer some advanced services. I started to contribute this project in May 2012 when I joined the team at Salzburg Research.
su4j
Set of SPARQL utilities for Java/Jena.
spac
SPARQL Proxy for Access Control.
parrot
Parrot is A RIF and RDF Ontologies documentation Tool.
Linked Open Colors
Linked Open Colors is a dataset created for the April Fools' Day of 2011 as an informal initiative for promoting Linked Data.
trioo
Keeping the semantics of rdf data safe and sound into object-oriented software. My master degree thesis.
RDFa Developer
Firefox extension that enables you to examine the RDFa markup, query the data using SPARQL and to detect common pitfalls in the use of RDFa 1.0.
djubby
Linked Data frontend for SPARQL endpoints for Django.
EzWeb
Mash-up web platform for a new generation of SOA.
SpecGen
A tool to generate technical specifications of RDF vocabularies/ontologies.
MyMobileWeb
Open-standards-based platform that simplifies the development of mobile web applications and portals, providing an advanced content and application adaptation environment.
RDFohloh
RDF wrapper for Ohloh.
Neologism
Easy RDFs Vocabulary Publishing based on Drupal.
Vapour
A Linked Data validator.
RESTinpy
Python library to ease the publication of REST-style web services in Django applications.
SemRadar
RDF detector for Mozilla Firefox.
FUTIL
Some useful tools around FOAF.
SWAML
Research project around the semantic web technologies to publish mailing lists' archives into RDF. My bachelor degree thesis.

In the development of these projects I collaborate with many people: Diego Berrueta, Iván Mínguez, Carlos Tejo, Miguel García, Jose María Álvarez, Iván Frade, Jose E. Labra, Ivan Herman, John Breslin, Uldis Bojars, Stéphane Corlosquet, Richard Cyganiak, Sebastian Schaffert, Rupert Westenthaler, Jakob Frank, Thomas Kurz, Rafa Haro, among others...

advisor

lecturing

  • Semantic Web Technologies. Bachelor Degree, MultiMediaTechnology, University of Applied Sciences. Salzburg, February 2017 - June 2017.
  • Semantic Web Technologies. Bachelor Degree, MultiMediaTechnology, University of Applied Sciences. Salzburg, February 2016 - June 2016.
  • Anwendungen in Wirtschaft und Technik, SS 2015. Universität Salzburg. Salzburg, May 5, 2015.
  • Semantic Web Technologies. Bachelor Degree, MultiMediaTechnology, University of Applied Sciences. Salzburg, February 2015 - June 2015.
  • Operating Systems. Degree in Video Game Design and Development. ESNE, attached to Camilo José Cela University. Oviedo, October 2011 - February 2012.
  • Herramientas de nueva generación para la Gestión del Conocimiento. Asignatura de Gestión del conocimiento y el capital intelectual, IV Master Internacional en Gestión de la Innovación y el Desarrollo Empresarial, Título Propio, Universidad de Oviedo. Gijón, 3 de diciembre de 2011.
  • Barra libre en proyectos de software... pero sólo hasta media noche. Ponencia invitada para la asignatura de "Dirección y gestión de proyectos Web", Máster en Ingeniería Web, Universidad de Oviedo. Oviedo, 26 de octubre de 2011.
  • Herramientas de nueva generación para la Gestión del Conocimiento. Asignatura de Gestión del conocimiento y el capital intelectual, III Master Internacional en Gestión de la Innovación y el Desarrollo Empresarial, Título Propio, Universidad de Oviedo. Gijón, 21 de enero de 2011.
  • Herramientas de nueva generación para la Gestión del Conocimiento. Asignatura de Gestión del conocimiento y el capital intelectual, II Master Internacional en Gestión de la Innovación y el Desarrollo Empresarial, Título Propio, Universidad de Oviedo. Gijón, 12 de febrero de 2010.
  • El Software Libre, fundamentos e impacto en la sociedad. Curso de Extensión Universitaria, Universidad de Oviedo. Oviedo, del 14 al 24 de abril de 2009. Co-Director. Slides.

committee

organizations

  • W3C Schema.org Community Group (May 2015 - present)
  • W3C Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group (Dec 2012 - July 2015)
  • W3C WebID Community Group (Jan 2012 - May 2015)
  • W3C WebID Incubator Group (Oct 2011 - Jan 2012)
  • LATC Advisory Committee (Sep 2010 - Apr 2012)
  • Morfeo Board (Jan 2008 - Apr 2012)
  • INES Open Source Software Working Group (Jun 2007 - Apr 2012)
  • W3C SWEO Linking Open Data Community Project (Jan 2007 - Mar 2008)

associations

awards

  • Best project in Web category. 1er Concurso Universitario de Software Libre. Sevilla (Spain), May, 2007. Award received for SWAML, my bachelor degree thesis.
  • Scholarship for Introduction to Research, cajAstur, January 2006.