About Stian Soiland-Reyes

Photo of Stian with beard

Overview

tl;dr: Senior Lecturer in FAIR, Open and Reproducible Digital Research. Research interests include Linked Data, FAIR digital objects, metadata, provenance, annotations, open source and software development best practices.

Biography

Stian Soiland-Reyes is a Senior Lecturer in FAIR, Open and Reproducible Digital Research and co-leader of the eScience Lab in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester.

In his research he is working on reproducibility, provenance and metadata to improve FAIR sharing of open research data and computational workflows, within ELIXIR Europe, European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) projects and the workflow repository WorkflowHub.eu, as well as building FAIR approaches for computational workflows and FAIR Digital Objects. Stian contributed to the W3C PROV standard and its implementation in workflow systems.

As one of the early founders of the Research Object approach for sharing research outputs using Linked Data, he is the co-lead of RO-Crate, a community-based lightweight approach to packaging and publishing research data with structured metadata. RO-Crate has been recognized for the EOSC Interoperability Framework.

He is a strong proponent of using open Web standards, including the use of FAIR Signposting to enable machine-actionable navigation to open data.

Stian is on the leadership team of Common Workflow Language, a standard for interoperable computational workflows, and he was on the technical steering committee for BioCompute Object, an approach for describing workflows for submission to regulatory authorities. Stian is the Technical and Community Advisor for the Workflows Community Initiative where he contributes to the task force FAIR Computational Workflows.

Stian graduated with a BSc (2003) and MSc (2007) in Computer Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and in 2024 will defend his PhD thesis at the Informatics Institute of University of Amsterdam.

He has more than two decades of experience as an IT professional, including 16 years as a software developer working across academia and industry. He joined the eScience Lab in 2005 (then called the myGrid team), where he became the Technical Lead Developer of the open-source scientific workflow management system Taverna. As part of the EU FP7-funded Wf4Ever project, Stian contributed to the W3C PROV specifications for capturing provenance and co-developed the Research Object model and ontologies. More recently Stian has continued this passion for reproducibility, structured metadata and open scholarship with engagement in several projects related to FAIR, computational workflows, and RO-Crate.

In 2023, Stian became a Research Fellow, and in November 2023 he was promoted to Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, taking up teaching duties, supervision and co-leadership of the eScience Lab.

Research projects

Stian is co-leading and contributing to eScience Lab’s participation in several European-wide research projects, including:

Previous projects

Teaching and supervising

In the Department of Computer Science, Stian assists in the teaching for:

From 2025/2026, the Computer Science MSc pathways will include programmes for AI, Cyber Security, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, and a more flexible programme Advanced Computer Science. For these programmes, Stian collaborates in developing course units for Data Engineering Concepts and AdvanCed Topics in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.

Stian teaches provenance models, FAIR data and reproducibility as part of the course unit Understanding Data and their Environment in the cross-faculty MSc Data Science programme at The University of Manchester.

As of 2024, Stian is supervising 2 PhD students in Manchester (in collaboration with Professor Carole Goble), two MSc projects for 2023/2024, and 6 BSc third-year projects for 2024/2025. He is one of the cohort advisors for postgraduate students in Computer Science.

He has previously co-supervised 1 PhD student and multiple BSc/MSc student projects. He has informally mentored PhD students internationally, as well as mentoring several student projects of Google Summer of Code.

PhD Candidate

In July 2019, Stian started as a PhD Candidate in the INDElab at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam. The PhD defence is scheduled for January 2025.

Member of committees and professional bodies

Stian has participated in W3C activities, co-authoring W3C Recommendations for Provenance, and collaborating on W3C Community efforts like Open Annotation (now Web Annotation Model), JSON-LD and w3id. He edited the ORE JSON-LD specification. He is part of the Common Workflow Language leadership team and co-author of the CWL specification. He is a Force11 member, where he promotes reproducibility best practices and open science. He is a member of the Technical Steering Committee for BioCompute Objects, and co-chair of Research Object Crate. He is a member of the task force for FAIR Metrics and Digital Objects Task Force in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). In the FAIR Digital Object Forum Stian is a member of the Technical Advisory Committee, Technical Specification & Implementation Group and FDO Semantics Group.

Stian used to be an active open source developer, and have contributed to software like ORCID, Apache Jena, OWL API, JSON-LD Java, as well as maintaining several Docker images. He is a Foundation Member of the Apache Software Foundation, where he is a on the Project Management Committee of Apache Commons, and Apache Incubator. He was a committer on Taverna in Apache Incubator and worked on Commons RDF. He is an occassional curator of abandomware including jai-imageio-core and beanshell.