Pieter Colpaert

thoughts

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• 2026-01-08

  Eventual Interoperability

  A pragmatic approach to interoperability: model your data richly for your own needs, then allow the eventual creation of one‑to‑many alignments.

  interoperability
• 2025-11-28

  SEMIC2025 Trip report

  In November 2025, I went to the SEMIC conference in Copenhagen. This is the trip report, in which I talk about data spaces, LDES and the EIF.

  conferences
• 2025-09-30

  Named graphs and RDF messages

  I’ve seen named graphs being called the most horrendous mistake in RDF standardization, to a necessary feature for which, without it, RDF wouldn’t be where it is today. In this blog post I try to explain my interpretation of all this, and how I believe named graphs are here to stay. I also introduce a future outlook, in which I believe we need to talk about RDF messages.

  linkeddata
• 2025-09-08

  SEMANTiCS2025 Trip report

  I went to SEMANTiCS2025 with the team in Vienna. I will especially remember: the keynote of Hannah Bast, the fish bowl discussion, and the work on the Jelly serialization. Our team took on quite some responsibilities as well, organizing a bunch of workshops and a tutorial.

  conferences
• 2025-09-03

  Four types of specification artefacts

  Interoperability isn’t about creating the one standard to rule them all. It’s about reusable artefacts. I argue there are four types: vocabularies, application profiles, interaction patterns, and implementation guides. Together, they form a toolbox for connecting systems across domains.

  interoperability

papers

Browse the papers overview.

I maintain a full list of my publications on my university’s bibliographic page and on Google Scholar.

• 2026

  RML Playground: Online Editing, Validation, and Execution for the RDF Mapping Language

  Els de Vleeschauwer, Arthur Vercruysse, Ben De Meester, Pieter Colpaert

  RML Playground guides users while they edit, validate, and execute RML mapping rules through real-time RDF syntax checks, SHACL validation, autocompletion, and configurable mapping-engine execution.

  ESWC · KGCW · preprint
• 2026

  Monitoring water using an RDF-based Water Data Space

  Shehabeldeen Abdelfatah, Julián Rojas, Janelcy Alferes, Pieter Colpaert

  This demonstrator visualizes hydrological time-series data for a water lock in an RDF-based water data space, using LDES and RDF Time Series Snippets to support ingestion, browsing, plotting, and SPARQL querying.

  ESWC · Demo · preprint
• 2026

  It’s Time to Standardize RDF Messages

  Pieter Colpaert, Piotr Sowiński

  This poster paper proposes RDF Messages as an explicit interoperability concept for grouping RDF statements into atomic communicative units across streams, logs, serializations, and tooling.

  ESWC · Poster · preprint
• 2026

  Demonstrating Online Schema Alignment in Decentralized Knowledge Graphs Querying

  Bryan-Elliott Tam, Pieter Colpaert, Ruben Taelman

  This demonstrator extends Link Traversal Query Processing with online schema alignment, allowing alignment rules to be discovered and applied dynamically while querying decentralized knowledge graphs.

  ESWC · Demo · preprint
• 2026

  The Vocabulary Hub as a Catalog for Semantic Artifacts for Discovery and Alignment of Datasets

  Ruben Dedecker, Julián Rojas Meléndez, Pieter Colpaert

  This paper shows how dataset profiles and profile alignments can extend vocabulary hubs in data spaces, enabling discovery and alignment of datasets toward consumer data models.

  ESWC · SDS · preprint

talks

• 2025-12-10

  Building sustainable interoperability strategies with the SEMIC LDES team

  SEMIC 2025 — workshop

  A workshop we organized at the European Commission conference on interoperability where we launched the updated LDES specification after the LDES standardization trajectory in 2025.

• 2023-07-10

  The next technology revolution: Fully automated data integration

  Connect 2023 — keynote

  At the Benelux API & Integration conference in Brussels

• 2021-03-16

  Linked Data Event Streams as the base API for European datasets

  ENDORSE2021 — keynote

  Keynote at the ENDORSE2021 conference introducing Linked Data Event Streams

• 2019-10-09

  GraphQL vs. REST for Open Data

  GhentJS — dev-talk

  Talking about GraphQL vs. REST:

• 2018-07-11

  Open data to create power for the many, not the few

  TEDxUCLouvain 2018 — TEDx

  The story so far with Open Data: we’re not there yet. Let’s make sure data can be adopted by the many, by making sure a machine can access it for you.

• 2017-09-22

  Keynote on Open Data: a Belgian perspective

  Open Sea Lab — Keynote

  Answers to questions what Open Data, Linked Data and Querying Web APIs means, with examples from Belgium.

• 2017-02-04

  Predicting the crowdedness of your next train

  Data Beers Brussels — Lightning talk

  In 2017 we ran a successful crowdfunding campaign for getting to know how busy your next train will be. We ended up coding this into iRail.be!