John Breslin is a lecturer in Electronic Engineering at the School of Engineering and Informatics, NUI Galway, and a researcher with DERI, a Semantic Web research institute at NUI Galway. He is co-leader and founder of the Social Software Unit at DERI. He is co-author of the book "The Social Semantic Web" (Springer, 2009). John was General Chair for the ICWSM-12 conference. He is also the founder of the SIOC project (Wikipedia article), which aims to interlink online communities with semantics. SIOC recently won the seven-year most influential paper award from ESWC.

John has received a number of awards for website design, including a Golden Spider for the Irish community website boards.ie (Wikipedia article), which he co-founded in 2000. The Irish Internet Association presented him with Net Visionary awards in 2005 and 2006. John is a director of boards.ie Ltd. and co-founder of Adverts Marketplace Ltd., and is also an advisor to some social media companies including CrowdGather, Inc. He has been interviewed or cited by various media sources including New Scientist, Computer, PC World, The Sunday Times and RTÉ. He is founder of the New Tech Post, a now-defunct web-based publisher of articles focusing on technology areas in business, video, mobile and social media. He is also co-founder of StreamGlider, Inc. with Nova Spivack and Bill McDaniel, a real-time streaming newsreader for the iPad.