About Me

Visual Design Studios is the open source development identity of Rob Vesse and has existed on the internet in one form or another since 2001.

I'm a passionate open source advocate involved in a number of projects in my primary field of interest which is the intersection of big data and Semantic Web technologies and can regularly found speaking on technical topics at conferences and meetups.

I started programming in ASP on a work experience placement at age 15 and caught the bug from there. By the time I reached university I was proficient in a number of dialects of Visual Basic. I gained a solid knowledge of Java and a great theoretical background on my undergraduate degree before progressing onto a PhD. It was during this time that I adopted C# as my primary development language.

During my PhD I also caught the Semantic Web bug and fell in love with the technologies there and have focused on them ever since. I developed dotNetRDF which is the de-facto standard API for these technologies on the .Net platform and am also a member of the Apache Jena project which is one of the two major APIs on the Java platform.

Since then my professional career has had me mainly writing Java code, which is my primary language these days. I also write plenty of Bash script, and dabble in Python occasionally.

I am highly proficient in SPARQL and previously developed and maintained a full SPARQL 1.1 implementation as part of dotNetRDF so I know the standard inside and out.

Rob Vesse headshot, picture taken 2023

Employment

January 2022 to Present

I am currently employed as the Principal Platform Engineer at Telicent, a UK based software startup building a secure event driven knowledge graph platform.

My role involves leading the Platform team in the design and development of new platform features based on internal product and customer driven requirements, and liasing with other teams and stakeholders in the business to deliver regular high-quality product releases.

October 2011 to December 2022

I was employed as a Software Engineer for YarcData which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Cray Inc, which was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in 2019.

I worked on their Urika product lines which were products for semantic graph analytics based upon Cray hardware architectures and a massively parallell RDF and SPARQL database engine known as Cray Graph Engine. Later the product adopted more big data features and provided integration between popular big data projects like Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, etc, Cray's hardware platform and the Cray Graph Engine.

Education

I posses a PhD in Computer Science from the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. My research was on the topic of Link Integrity for the Semantic Web.

Prior to this I obtained a 1st Class Honours degree in Computer Science from the University of Nottingham