PhD in Computer Science by the University of Murcia in 2003. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics and Systems, which I joined in 2003. I have served as Vicedean of the School of Computer Science at the University of Murcia (Spain) from 2006 to 2010. Some of my responsabilities were the International Exchange Programmes and the Industrial Placements of our students. I was part of the organizing committee of the XXV Anniversary of the computing studies at the University of Murcia. In 2010 I became Web Coordinator of the University of Murcia. I am the Director of the Master in Bioinformatics of the University of Murcia. I am member of the International Association of Ontologies and its Applications and the International Society of Computational Biology. Our research group is also part of the Regional BioHealth Research Institute.

My current activity is focused on the research of Ontology Engineering and Semantic Web technologies for Medical Informatics, Bioinformatics and E-learning. A brief description of my activity in these areas are described next:

Medical Informatics: Our work is mainly devoted to the use of ontologies to manage clinical archetypes and electronic healthcare records. We are currently working with both ISO 13606 and OpenEHR standards. To date, we have produced a set of EHR-related OWL ontologies and a system to transform ADL archetypes into OWL ones and to transform archetypes and data extracts between such standards. I am currently serving as external expert in the FP7 Semantic HealthNet.

Bioinformatics: We are developing methodologies and frameworks for quality evaluation (OQuaRE) and enhancement of bio-ontologies (OntoEnrich), and tools for the semantic integration of biological information and knowledge. Our work “Enriching the Gene Ontology via the Dissection of Labels using the Ontology Preprocessor Language” (J.T. Fernandez-Breis, L. Iannone, I. Palmisano, A. Rector, R. Stevens) was awarded as **Best Research Paper** at EKAW 2010.

E-Learning: We are addressing different issues related to Semantic Web-based student assessment. On the one hand, the OeLE project attempts to evaluate automatically open questions written in natural language and using Semantic Web technologies to rank individuals in groups work and promoting self-assessment and autonomous learning. In this area, we are currently able to generate useful semantic feedback for both students and teachers and to design personalized courses based on the skills and knowledge of the person.

More information at http://webs.um.es/jfernand