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!