Posts

The European Economic Area is one of the best use cases for (semantic) data integration: the many different languages, legislations, rules and systems must be or become interoperable! On October 8 and 9, 2025, I attended the 3rd European Data Conference on Reference Data and Semantics (ENDORSE) in the European Commission’s building Charlemagne in Brussels, Belgium. In this blog post I will reflect on the conference, provide details from some of the presentations, and talk about my own presentation in the Cultural Heritage session.

In the old days, research was done by famous individuals. Nowadays, research is a team effort! Working together requires making agreements about how to collaborate and using common tools. These kinds of agreements (or standards) and tools are especially crucial given the amount of data nowadays. Me and around 700 other people attended the 2nd Conference on Research Data Infrastructure, in Aachen, Germany from August 26 to 28, 2025. In this blog post I will reflect on the various presentations and posters I saw as well as the discussions I had.

It is difficult to foster innovation and perform high quality research when the underlying data is not accessible and usable. Data and data services should be offered via so-called research data infrastructures, think of user-friendly web platforms, repositories, and databases. But how does it work in practice, and how important is the human aspect of it? I have been at the 1st Conference on Research Data Infrastructure, 12 – 14 September 2023, and got some pretty good insights. In this blog post I will reflect on the conference and cover the keynotes, the poster sessions, our own work around Knowledge Graphs and Wikibase, as well as a selection of other interesting talks.

With the Resource Description Framework (RDF) you can represent Linked Data as subject-predicate-object triples. But what if you have to represent additional context of those triples? In this Blog post I will briefly introduce the advanced data management feature “named graphs” with two examples: different data source named graphs in the BELTRANS project and different story-contexts for Digital Humanities research. Furthermore I will graphically illustrate the different ways you can query named graphs with SPARQL!

In June 2023 I attended a workshop in Hasselt, Belgium, organized by a research network on Knowledge Graphs and Data Integration. Linked Data-based systems and declarative SPARQL queries somehow magically do all the work efficiently, but how? For many people, presentations about using Linked Data and SPARQL already seem very technical. But this event went further, it covered the fundamental algorithms that power the Linked Data systems! In this post I try my best to briefly summarize some of the talks and highlight the added value of those fundamental and often behind-the-scenes work.

This year we had the honor to host the 10th anniversary edition of the DHBenelux conference at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR). In this blog post I will reflect on the different sessions I’ve attended at this year’s multitrack edition of DHBenelux 2023. I will group my notes around the following four recurring topics of the talks that I have seen: (1) data platforms and their usability, (2) how digital methods such as Linked Open Data are used for DH research, the other way around, (3) how DH research studies digital methods and tools, and finally (4) research with (historical) geospatial data in cultural heritage.

Es ist besonders schwierig die eigene Dokotorarbeit der Familie und Freunden zu erklären, gerade in so einem abstrakten Gebiet wie der Informatik. Im folgenden Blogpost werde Ich versuchen meine Doktorarbeit zu erklären, befreit von akademischer Genauigkeit und mehr mit dem Großen und Ganzen im Blick.

At the end of November 2019 I could visit the sunny California to attend the Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-Cap). A lot of interesting workshops, tutorials and talks covered topics such as the representation of knowledge in Wikidata, approaches to transform tabular data to Linked Data, or the representation of scientific literature and processes as Knowledge Graphs. Additionally I could present our work on MontoloStats. Continue reading for the full trip report!