Owen Stephens
Consultant at Owen Stephens Consulting
Royal Leamington Spa, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolOwen Stephens is a consultant with 13 years' experience helping libraries harness IT, running his own consultancy since 2010 and delivering projects that publish library and scholarly data as Linked Open Data. He combines deep sector knowledge—leading initiatives like CORE/ServiceCORE and technical leadership on KnowledgeBase Plus—with hands-on systems experience from roles at Imperial College and The Open University. Owen has led repository and e-theses services (SPIRAL, EThOS) and co-authored national guidance on open bibliographic data and shared ERM services, showing a knack for turning complex metadata and workflow requirements into practical services. He is also an active open-source contributor to OpenRefine, improving front-end UX for messy-data tooling, reflecting a practical focus on usability as well as standards. Based in Royal Leamington Spa, he blends strategic leadership, project delivery and technical craft to modernise library services.
13 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
BSc., Mathematics, with one year joint Psychology, BSc., Mathematics, with one year joint Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of LondonPG Dip, Information Management, PG Dip, Information Management at University of West London
Stackoverflow
1,550reputation
50kreached
70answers
0questions
Github Skills (18)
javascript10
uid10
front-end-development10
html10
ui-design9
css9
user-interface8
interface-design8
data-analysis7
opencorporates6
nominatim6
csv6
data-wrangling6
excel6
data-manipulation6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
OpenRefine/OpenRefine
Sep 2017 - Oct 2022
OpenRefine is a free, open source power tool for working with messy data and improving it
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:73 reviews, 170 commits, 72 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Owen made several contributions to the OpenRefine project's front-end, particularly in the areas of UI improvements and user experience. They implemented a feature to alert users of newer versions, fixing and refining the version-checking functionality. The user also added UI elements to the edit cells menu to support features such as splitting multi-valued cells. Further contributions included improvements to the display and usability of facets, and enhanced the display of information in the data table view.
pythonopenrefinemessy-datareconciliationdatacleaning
LibraryCarpentry/lc-open-refine
Mar 2019 - Jan 2023
Library Carpentry: OpenRefine
Contributions:103 reviews, 96 commits, 120 PRs in 3 years 10 months
data-managementdata-scienceenglishcarpentriesdata-visualisation
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