John Breslin ( ga, Seán Ó Breisleáin; born 1973 in

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

) is an Irish engineer and full professor at the University of Galway. He is co-founder of the Irish websites boards.ie and adverts.ie. He co-authored the Irish bestselling book ''

Old Ireland in Colour ''Old Ireland in Colour'' is the first in a series of non-fiction history books written by Irish academics John Breslin and Sarah-Anne Buckley. Released in Ireland in 2020 and in the US in 2021, it consists chiefly of colourisations of black-and ...

'' in 2020 and ''

Old Ireland in Colour 2 Old or OLD may refer to: Places *Old, Baranya, Hungary *Old, Northamptonshire, England *Old Street station, a railway and tube station in London (station code OLD) *OLD, IATA code for Old Town Municipal Airport and Seaplane Base, Old Town, Mai ...

'' in 2021.

Internet entrepreneur

In 1998, Breslin set up an

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

to discuss video games which evolved into boards.ie, one of Ireland's largest indigenous websites. He was awarded Net Visionary awards by the

Irish Internet Association Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...

in 2005 and 2006. In 2006, Breslin co-founded adverts.ie, an online classified ads website and spin-off from boards.ie. The adverts.ie site was acquired in a joint venture by Distilled Media Group and Schibsted Media Group in 2015. In 2007, Breslin met the Collison brothers while

Patrick Patrick may refer to: * Patrick (given name), list of people and fictional characters with this name * Patrick (surname), list of people with this name People * Saint Patrick (c. 385–c. 461), Christian saint *Gilla Pátraic (died 1084), Patrick ...

was studying at MIT, and came up with the name for their first company, 'Shuppa', during a brainstorming session over dinner. In 2010, Breslin set up the New Tech Post, an online technology publisher. A San Jose office for the New Tech Post was announced by Breslin in March 2011. In 2011, Breslin was announced as a co-founder of StreamGlider, a visual real-time dashboard for tracking interests across various types of devices, along with

Nova Spivack Nova Spivack is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is the founder and CEO of the early stage science and technology incubator Magical and co-founder of The Arch Mission Foundation. Spivack previously co-founded Bottle ...

and Bill McDaniel.

Academic research

In 2004, while working as a researcher at

DERI Deri may refer to : People * Aryeh Deri (born 1959), an Israeli politician * Frances Deri (1880–1971), an Austrian psychoanalyst * Miksa Déri (1854–1938), a Hungarian electrical engineer * Shlomo Deri (fl. 2000s), an Israeli politician * ...

, Breslin founded the

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project (SIOC ( )) is a Semantic Web technology. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an o ...

(SIOC) project, a Semantic Web framework for sharing social data and used in web applications such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey,

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

7 and the

Newsweek ''Newsweek'' is an American weekly online news magazine co-owned 50 percent each by Dev Pragad, its president and CEO, and Johnathan Davis (businessman), Johnathan Davis, who has no operational role at ''Newsweek''. Founded as a weekly print m ...

website. Breslin's research publications have focused on the Social Semantic Web, and he co-authored two books on this topic in 2009 and 2015.

Startup community

In 2015, Breslin co-founded the

Galway City Innovation District Galway ( ; ga, Gaillimh, ) is a City status in Ireland, city in the West Region, Ireland, West of Ireland, in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Connacht, which is the county town of County Galway. It lies on the River Corrib between Lo ...

to create startup-friendly spaces in downtown Galway. The first space, the PorterShed, is a refurbished former Guinness building that opened to startups in April 2016.

Writing

In 2019, Breslin set up the

project, which uses a combination of artificial intelligence techniques (such as DeOldify) and human artistry to colourise and restore historical photographs of Ireland and Irish people from the 19th and 20th centuries. An ''Old Ireland in Colour'' book with some of these photographs, featuring captions written by historian Sarah-Anne Buckley, was published by

Merrion Press Irish Academic Press is an independent Irish publishing house that was established in 1974, with a focus on Irish history, politics, literature and the arts. History Irish Academic Press was founded by Frank Cass in 1974 and, following his deat ...

in October 2020. Breslin spoke to Ryan Tubridy about the book on The Late Late Show on 20 November 2020. ''Old Ireland in Colour'' was the number one bestselling book in Ireland from 15 to 28 November 2020 and from 6 to 26 December 2020 according to Nielsen BookScan. It was also the official Christmas number one for 2020 according to Nielsen BookScan. It also won Best Irish-Published Book of the Year at the

Irish Book Awards The Irish Book Awards are Irish literary awards given annually to books and authors in various categories. In 2018 An Post took over sponsorship of the awards from Bord Gais Energy. It is the only literary award supported by all-Irish bookstores. ...

2020. A second volume, ''Old Ireland in Colour 2'', also co-authored with Sarah-Anne Buckley, was published by

in September 2021. ''Old Ireland in Colour 2'' was the number one bestselling book in Ireland from 21–27 November 2021 according to Nielsen BookScan.

Other activities

Breslin served as secretary of the American Council on Exercise from 2017 to 2019.

References

Bibliography

* John Breslin, Sarah-Anne Buckley, "Old Ireland in Colour 2", Merrion Press, , 2020. * John Breslin, Sarah-Anne Buckley, "Old Ireland in Colour", Merrion Press, , 2020. * Tope Omitola, Sebastián A. Ríos, John Breslin, "Social Semantic Web Mining", Morgan Claypool, , 2015. * John Breslin, Alexandre Passant, Stefan Decker, "The Social Semantic Web", Springer, , 2009. * John Breslin, Stefan Decker, "The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics", IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 11, pp. 86–90, 2007. * John Breslin, Andreas Harth, Uldis Bojars, Stefan Decker, "Towards Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities", The 2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC '05), LNCS vol. 3532, pp. 500–514, Heraklion, Greece, 2005.

External links

John Breslin's personal page

Old Ireland in Colour

PorterShed

SIOC

boards.ie
{{DEFAULTSORT:Breslin, John 1973 births Living people Academics of the University of Galway Irish engineers People educated at Catholic University School Alumni of the University of Galway