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

  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.

  ESWC2026 — preprint
• 2025

  Incentivizing sustainable data exchanges through unique contextualization of history and destiny

  Wout Slabbinck, Beatriz Gonçalves Crisóstomo Esteves, Maarten de Mildt, Ruben Dedecker, Julian Andres Rojas Melendez, Sofie Verbrugge, Didier Colle, Pieter Colpaert, Ruben Verborgh

  This paper motivates Trust Envelopes as uniquely contextualized wrappers around data, provenance, and usage conditions to support more sustainable and compliant data exchanges.

  WOP2025 — published
• 2025

  Miravi: a linked data viewer

  Els de Vleeschauwer, Martin Vanbrabant, Ben De Meester, Pieter Colpaert

  Miravi is a configurable Linked Data viewer that demonstrates how decentralized and permissioned Linked Data sources can still be queried and visualized in a user-friendly Web interface.

  SEMANTICS2025 — published
• 2025

  May the FORCE be with you? A framework for ODRL rule compliance through evaluation

  Wout Slabbinck, Julian Andres Rojas Melendez, Beatriz Gonçalves Crisóstomo Esteves, Ruben Verborgh, Pieter Colpaert

  This paper presents FORCE, a framework and Web playground built around ODRL evaluation to make policy interpretation more uniform, testable, and easier to understand.

  SEMANTICS2025 — published
• 2025

  Extending RML to support permissioned data sharing with multiple views

  Els de Vleeschauwer, Gerald Haesendonck, Ben De Meester, Pieter Colpaert

  The usage of Semantic Web technologies for data integration has extended from open data sharing to permissioned data sharing, as exemplified by standardization efforts from, for example, the Solid project, the Fedora ...

  KGCW2025 — published

talks

• 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!