Simon Spero
Founding Partner at Criticollab, LLC
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSimon Spero is a founding partner and systems-savvy ontology engineer with over two decades of UNIX/Linux administration and more than 25 years of C/C++ experience, who now focuses on bringing agile software practices to semantic systems through Criticollab. He blends deep protocol and performance expertise—from early HTTP research and pioneering multithreaded web servers to modern performance engineering—with extensive ontology and semantic-web work (OWLAPI, SKOS, Linked Data). Simon has a strong track record in back-end engineering, open-source contributions (notably improvements to the OWL API and Apache Commons Compress), and optimizing memory and reasoning in Protege. His background spans applied research (PhD work on ontologies and large-scale analysis) to hands-on systems architecture, identity and security engineering, and cluster/distributed programming. Notably, he implemented some of the first HTTP benchmarking and protocol-level analyses that presaged later web performance advances, bringing uncommon historical depth to contemporary semantic engineering challenges.
13 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
BSc. Eng, ACGI, Computing, BSc. Eng, ACGI, Computing at Imperial College LondonPh.D, Information and Library Science, Ph.D, Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
French, hebrew (רק קצת)
Github Skills (9)
nio10
unit-testing10
javas10
knowledge-graph10
java10
maven9
commons8
macos8
osgi8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
owlcs/owlapi
Mar 2014 - Nov 2017
OWL API main repository
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:365 commits, 54 PRs, 13 pushes in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on improving the OWL API, specifically addressing the generation of transitive object property assertions and enhancing unit tests related to OBO file conversion. Their work involved refactoring code to avoid adding trivial transitivity, which could improve performance. Additionally, they implemented tests and made changes that addressed the handling of different annotation types and improved the robustness of the parsing process.
apijsonldowlowl-apisemantic-web
protegeproject/protege
Mar 2014 - Mar 2015
Protege Desktop
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 4 PRs, 26 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Simon contributed to the Protege Desktop project by making changes to support the OWL API, a core dependency. They focused on adapting the build process for different OWL API versions and reducing the memory footprint of ontology views, which involved optimizing rendering logic and managing resources efficiently. Additionally, the user added functionality to extend the reasoner menu and made Mac OS specific changes related to application behavior.
semanticsknowledge-graphelectronowlobo
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