Pieter Colpaert

thoughts

Subscribe to the atom feed

• 2026-09-09

  SEMANTiCS2026 trip report

  SEMANTiCS2026 is coming to Ghent. I will update this post afterwards with my trip report. For now, this is what I am looking forward to during the week.

  conferences
• 2026-07-16

  Why on earth would you publish data as RDF?

  A rebuttal to a blog post of Anne Schuth, I which I argue that RDF will earn its place in real neurosymbolic systems. Its best argument is eventual interoperability across organizations.

  linkeddata
• 2026-06-17

  Automating alignments

  Inferring more knowledge from existing knowledge (inferencing) and alignments on top of OWL and SKOS can be implemented as reusable N3 rule profiles. With in-page demos, this post shows how ontologies, taxonomies and shapes can work together to infer useful facts, validation reports and even shape-to-shape processing plans.

  linkeddata
• 2026-06-11

  Giving systems a reason to act

  Interoperability across organisations means automating trust. Data needs enough context to be used as a trust trigger for changing internal state.

  interoperability
• 2026-05-27

  Social media for researchers

  Social media can be a powerful tool for research communication, but only when posts give people something concrete to engage with. These are a few principles I try to apply when communicating research online, especially around conferences, papers, demos, and project results.

  conferences

papers

Browse the papers overview.

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

• 2026

  Does SRL Pave the Road to Explainable Reasoning? Lessons Learned from an Implementer's Perspective

  Lander Maes, Bryan-Elliott Tam, Jitse De Smet, Jos De Roo, Pieter Colpaert, Ruben Taelman

  This paper evaluates two Shape Rules Language engines and shows how SRL can support useful RDF reasoning tasks, with trade-offs between reuse of SPARQL infrastructure and dedicated execution performance.

  SEMANTiCS · SAGE · preprint
• 2026

  Building Thoroughly Tested Semantic Rule Engines in the Age of GenAI

  Patrick Hochstenbach, Jos De Roo, Wout Slabbinck, Beatriz Esteves, Pieter Colpaert

  The paper introduces a large Notation3 conformance test suite and shows how thoroughly tested in-browser semantic rule engines can support interoperable, legally compliant, and trustworthy data flows.

  SEMANTiCS · SAGE · preprint
• 2026

  The Eyeling Playground: N3 rules in your browser

  Patrick Hochstenbach, Jos De Roo, Wout Slabbinck, Beatriz Esteves, Pieter Colpaert

  Eyeling brings Notation3 rule-based reasoning to Web applications, and the Eyeling Playground lets users run examples, load data and rules, inspect derived facts, and explore proof-oriented explanations in the browser.

  SEMANTiCS · Demo · preprint
• 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

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!