Associate Professor Vassilios Peristeras – (on special leave)

I am Associate Professor at the International Hellenic University, School for Science and Technology in Thessaloniki, Greece, and Associate Research Fellow at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Public Governance Institute, Belgium. I am currently on special leave (αναστολή καθηκόντων) as I work for the Council of the EU.

My teaching and research focus on the areas of business information systems, eGovernment, eParticipation, eCommerce, interoperability, open and linked data, information management strategies and semantic web technologies. I always try to create bridges between the business and technology worlds, as well as between scientific/academia and professional communities. I enjoy working for the digital transformation of modern organisations.

From 2010 – 2016, I have worked as Programme Manager in the European Commission, Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administration (ISA/ISA²) Programme being in charge for semantic interoperability and open data. During this period, I contributed to several initiatives including the following:

• I’ve initiated and coordinated the work around horizontal eGovernment data standards such as the Core Vocabularies, the Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS, also a W3C Note) and the Data Catalog Application Profile (DCAT-AP). This later became the data standard used by the European Data Portal to federate open data descriptions over 70 Open Data Catalogues across Europe.
• I’ve worked on the Interoperability Maturity Model, the Common Assessment Method for Standards and Specification, the European Interoperability Reference Architecture, the Catalogue of Services and Access to Base Registries actions of the EC/ISA Programme.
• I contributed to the work of DG Employment on the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) taxonomy and coordinated pilots trying to match supply/demand in the labor market with the use of ESCO.
• I participated in the preparation of the European Commission strategy on Data, Information and Knowledge Management, an effort to develop a relevant strategy for the whole of the European Commission, coordinated by the EC General Secretariat.
• I initiated and was in charge from 2011 to 2016 for the SEMIC conference series.
• Last, I have been the content coordinator for the revised European Interoperability Framework which was published by the European Commission as part of COM(2017) 134, 23.3.2017.

I’ve been Research Fellow and eGovernment cluster leader in the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway, Ireland (now INSIGHT). There amongst others, I initiated DCAT (the Data Catalogue vocabulary), currently a W3C standard, together with my master student Fadi Maali and Richard Cyganiak. DCAT-AP, currently a de facto open data standard in Europe as discussed above, is an application profile based on DCAT.

Before that, I worked as researcher and consultant in various organizations, including the United Nations, Department of Public Economy and Public Administration (DPEPA) (2000-2003) and the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece. I initiated and coordinated several international R&D projects in the area of Electronic Government (e.g. Infocitizen, EU-Publi.com, SemanticGov, etc).

I’ve published over 140 scientific papers and served as editor, program committee member and reviewer in more than 70 scientific journals, books, conferences. The Publish or Perish tool on 15/10/2024, gives me an H-index of 34 and more than 4100 references to my work.