Research Group(s)

• eScience Lab 
• Information Management Group (IMG)

Stian Soiland-Reyes is a Technical Architect and Research Associate at the eScience Lab in the Department of Computer Science. As a joint researcher and software developer 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 including EOSC-Life and the workflow repository WorkflowHub.eu, as well as building FAIR approaches for high-performance compute (HPC) environments within BioExcel.

Stian contributed to the W3C PROV standard and its implementation in workflow systems. As one of the early founders to the Research Object approach for sharing research outputs using Linked Data, he is now the co-lead of RO-Crate, a community-based lightweight approach to packaging and publishing research data with structured metadata. Stian is on the leadership team of Common Workflow Language, a standard for interoperable computational workflow, as well as on the technical steering committee for BioCompute Object, an approach for describing workflows for submission to regulatory authorities.

He graduated in 2006 with an MSc in Computer Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He has more than two decades of experience as an IT professional, including 15 years as a software developer working across academia and industry. He joined the myGrid team in 2005 (now eScience Lab), where he became the Technical Lead Developer of the successful, open-source scientific workflow management system Taverna, which he helped transition to the Apache Software Foundation incubator. 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, now implemented as RO-Crate where Stian is co-leader.

In recent years, Stian has continued this passion for reproducibility, structured metadata and open scholarship with engagement in projects related to FAIR, computational workflows, and RO-Crate.

Stian is co-leading and contributing to eScience Lab’s participation in several European-wide research projects, including: BY-COVID, EOSC-Life, FAIR-IMPACT, EuroScienceGateway, BioDT, Synthesys+.

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.

Stian is 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.

Stian’s expertise and research interests span software development and architecture, Linked Data, SOAP and REST Web Services, distributed and cloud computing, annotations, Open Science & Open Data, scientific computing, provenance and digital preservation, open source development and web standards.

Stian works in the eScience Lab research group, led by Professor Carole Goble. The group is based at the Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester. It’s affiliated with the wider Information Management Group.

The eScience Lab team are focused on research and development around a set of tools designed for data driven and computational research. The tools support the coming together of people, data and methods in a particular research area; this is also know as an e-laboratory. These e-Laboratories or e-Labs support domains as diverse as systems biology, social science, music, astronomy, multimedia and chemistry. The tools have been adopted by a large number of projects and institutions.

I am a strong believer in Open Access and Open Peer Review, such as practiced by GigaScience, The Journal of Open Source Software and F1000 Research.

If I'm invited to do a closed peer review, I always make it into a signed peer review, and invite the authors to open it, by starting my review with a text like:

Hi, I am Stian Soiland-Reyes https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718 and have pledged the Open Peer Review Oath https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.5686.2:

• • Principle 1: I will sign my name to my review
  • Principle 2: I will review with integrity
  • Principle 3: I will treat the review as a discourse with you; in particular, I will provide constructive criticism
  • Principle 4: I will be an ambassador for the practice of open science

This review is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ and is also available at the (For now) secret URL https://gist.github.com/stain/TODO

If you agree to make this peer review public, I would happily appreciate a message to <soiland-reyes@manchester.ac.uk>

Don't worry - I only make the review public if they agree!

Why don't you try it? You would be surprised how many say yes, or who may even thank you! Talking of which, thanks to Sarven Capadisli who introduced me to this "trick" in his review of our PAV paper. 

Note: As I have signed the Cost of Knowledge pledge, I will not publish, referee or do editorial work with any Elsevier publication.

tl;dr: Open Source research software engineer with interests in Linked Data, RESTful web services, provenance, annotations, open science, reproducible research results.

• twitter.com/soilandreyes
• orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718
• slides.com/soilandreyes
• slideshare.net/soilandreyes
• github.com/stain
• linkedin.com/in/stain/
• skype:soiland

Stian teaches about provenance as part of courses:

• DATA71011 Understanding Data and their Environment: MSc Data Science (all pathways)
• DATA70002 Understanding Data and its Environment: CDT Data Analytics and Society

• Thursdays 09:00-11:30
• Room 2.71, Kilburn Building
• Phone: 0161-275-0689

Current PhD students:

• Meznah Aloqalaa

Stian co-supervise several MSc and BSc students together with Carole Goble, with topics like:

• Research Objects
• Reproducibility
• FAIR Computational Workflows
• Open source software
• Metadata and research data management
• Web services