Blog icon

Mr Ashley Sommer

Informatics Software Engineer

https://people.csiro.au/s/a/ashley-sommer

Contact

Please enter a valid first name

Please enter a valid last name

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter your message to send to the contact

Contact details:

GPO BOX 2583
BRISBANE QLD 4001 AUSTRALIA

Biography

Ashley has been working in the Environment Informatics Group in CSIRO Land and Water since January 2016, a key contributor to various projects including Bioregional Assessments Programme, Oznome for Land and Water, DAMBusters, Soils Sensing, TraNSIT, LOC-I (Location-Index), COTS Control Innovation Program (CCIP), and TERN Landscapes.

Since July 2020, Ashley has been leading the Data Management and Delivery work package of TERN Landscapes, overseeing the creation of dataset pipelines, workflows and infrastructure for the collection, transformation, storage, access, management, and delivery of Landscapes data into TERN. During this time, Ashley has developed specialist skills in the area of geospatial dataset delivery workflows, and best practices.

Ashley Sommer studied a Bachelor of Information Technology, with major in Software Development, and minor in Intelligent Systems. He graduated from Griffith University in Brisbane in December 2015 with Distinction.

Primarily a Python programmer, Ashley also has a strong interest in emerging software development technologies, including asynchronous programming and functional programming. Ashley has experience with new language technologies such as Julia and Rust.

Ashley has an interest in - and experience with - RDF and Linked Data technologies, including SPARQL query language and SHACL constraints language.

Ashley is the lead developer and project manager on PySHACL. PySHACL is the most complete open-source implementation of the SHACL W3C specification, with more than 160 github stars and over 20,000 downloads per month.

Ashley is part of the maintainership and steering team of the RDFLib project, an integral piece of semantic web technology that has been used by ontologists, researchers, analysts, developers, computer scientist and students since 2003.

Ashley also has experience with Dev-Ops technologies, including Containerisation (docker), Kubernetes, Terraform, Vagrant, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Jenkins, as well as extensive traditional Linux and Unix System Administration skills.

Achievements and Awards

  • 11/2016-11/2016

    AgCatalyst Ag Data Challenge - Winning team, grand prize winner
    CSIRO Ag and Food

  • 06/2017-06/2017

    Awarded for recognition by the Bioregional Assessment Program Implementation board for the dedication to delivering the Bioregional Assessment Project
    CSIRO Land and Water

  • 2013-2014

    Academic Excellence Award (Semester award)
    Queensland Institute of Business and Technology

  • 2014-2015

    Academic Excellence Award (Semester award)
    Griffith University

Current Roles

  • Informatics Software Engineer
    Creating informatics services and infrastructure, data analysis software, data workflow and delivery pipelines, integrating and testing, devops and administration.

  • Acting Team Leader - Information Infrastructure Applications Team
    Acting as lead for a team of 5 people for Information Infrastructure Applications in the Environmental Informatics Group

Academic Qualifications

  • 2013

    Diploma of Information Technology with Excellence
    Queensland Institute of Business and Technology

  • 2015

    Bachelor of Information Technology (Advanced) with Distinction
    Griffith University

Other highlights

  • 07/2018-08/2018

    Presented a Technical Paper at the International Hydroinformatics Conference in Palermo

We have publications by Mr Ashley Sommer

    Published data & software

    We have published items by Mr Ashley Sommer