Dimitris Kontokostas
Principal Software Engineer, Data Platform
Greece
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDimitris Kontokostas is a Principal Software Engineer specializing in data platforms and large-scale knowledge graphs, with 15 years of experience bridging research and production. He led data quality, fusion, and freshness initiatives at Diffbot and now shapes the knowledge graph work at Medidata, combining hands-on engineering with platform-level strategy. A PhD in large-scale knowledge extraction, co-author of "Validating RDF Data," and long-time contributor to DBpedia, he has deep expertise in RDF, SPARQL, ontologies and scalable ingestion pipelines. He co-designed W3C validation standards (SHACL/ShEx) and created widely used tools like RDFUnit, reflecting a rare mix of standards, research impact (1600+ citations), and operational delivery. His open-source contributions include significant refactors to the prominent DBpedia extraction framework to improve stability and extraction quality. Based in Greece, he is known for driving high-impact improvements with lean teams and pragmatic engineering.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Large-scale knowledge Extraction publishing & Quality Assessment, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Large-scale knowledge Extraction publishing & Quality Assessment at Leipzig UniversityMasters in Web Science Mathematics and Computer Science, Masters in Web Science Mathematics and Computer Science at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH)Polytechnic 5-year degree Electronic & Computer Engineering, Polytechnic 5-year degree Electronic & Computer Engineering at Technical University of Crete
English, Greek
Stackoverflow
913reputation
72kreached
21answers
5questions
text-files
top-5%
Github Skills (18)
java10
javas10
text-files9
wikidata9
apidoc8
api8
database-design8
api-design8
mysql8
rdf6
sparql6
semantic-web6
linux6
webscraping6
ruby6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
dbpedia/extraction-framework
Jan 2011 - Jan 2018
The software used to extract structured data from Wikipedia
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 14 reviews, 1402 commits in 7 years
Contributions summary:Dimitris appears to have focused on refactoring the code base and adding core functionality by replacing legacy components and improving performance. This is evident in the commit messages, which describe replacing older feeders with a general-purpose OAI feeder. They also made changes to improve the quality of the information extracted from the existing templates. The user also worked on improving the overall stability of the system.
pythonstructured-datastructuredwikipedia
dbpedia/dbpedia-live-mirror
Jun 2014 - Aug 2018
Keeps a mirror of DBpedia live in sync
Contributions:95 commits, 2 PRs, 8 pushes in 4 years 1 month
dbpediadatabasesync
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