A few things about me..

My name is Kostas Ntonas, I live in Thessaloniki, Greece, and I am a software engineer. I studied Computer Science at the University of Ioannina and received an MSc degree in Information Systems from the Department of Informatics of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Currently, I am an Information Technology (IT) contractor at the Special Account Management Office of the International Hellenic University, a Greek state University where programmes are taught exclusively in English. However, I also work as a freelance software developer. For some time now, I have been collaborating with the awarded Veria Central Public Library (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 2010 award) in the context of the “EuropeanaLocal” project. My contribution is to transform the metadata of certain digital libraries into the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) format so that their content can be added to the Hellenic Aggregator for Europeana.

Recently, I participated in e-nnovation 2011, a Greek, nationwide competition for digital innovation and entrepreneurship, and hopefully our idea, “apiculate”, got the 3rd place (out of 107 proposals)!

One of my most important skills is writing short but very powerful scripts for text manipulation, data transformations as well as creation, parsing and processing of XML documents. Moreover, I have experience with APIs (Google REST API, Yahoo! Search Boss, Bing API 2.0, Hotwire API and others), metadata standards and protocols such as Z39.50, OAI-PMH, Dublin Core and OpenSearch. If you think we could collaborate on an IT project, I would be more than glad to hear from you.

My research interests include web data extraction, information retrieval, software engineering tools and techniques as well as programming languages. Perl is my favorite programming language but I also have a very good knowledge of C and Delphi. Moreover, I recently started puttering around with Python. Generally speaking, I am a free software supporter.

If you are interested in web scraping, then perhaps you would like to try DEiXTo, a free yet powerful web data extraction tool that I have created in the first place in partial fulfillment of the requirements for my MSc. It has grown up and improved a lot since 2007, when it was first released. It is now used by many people and some companies all over the world. Indicatively, in the last 12 months DEiXTo’s website had more than 7.300 visits from 108 different countries. Click here to watch a brief presentation.

On September 2010, I took over the primary maintenance of WWW::Mechanize::Sleepy, a CPAN Perl module that implements a sleepy Mechanize agent (a browser emulator capable of spacing out its http requests).

On this website you can also find a short CV of mine and view my publications.