Shirly Stephen graduated with a Bachelor's in Geoinformatics Engineering from Anna University and is currently a graduate student in Spatial Information Science and Engineering at the University of Maine.

The work presented in Semantic Interoperability for Geographically Distributed Sensor and Control Systems, part of the Ontology Summit 2016, is part of her Master's thesis which she will defend this May. Before working on her thesis project, she has worked with Kate Beard on a Sesame RDF database with a SPARQL endpoint for the NHD.