This year, SEMANTiCS is coming to Ghent. As local chair, I am excited to welcome the community to the city where I work with the Knowledge on Web-Scale team on Linked Data, knowledge graphs, interoperability, and trust. The conference takes place from 15 to 17 September, but for me the week starts on Monday and continues until Friday.
Monday: Trust Triggers 2 and the KG4DI network
On Monday, I start with Trust Triggers 2, a joint event with the KG4DI network. This edition focuses on neurosymbolic AI. Marta Sabou will give the keynote, followed by talks and discussions on how symbolic knowledge and machine learning can work together.
I am organizing this event through the Trustflows community. It is a good way to start the week because trust, interoperability, rules, and neurosymbolic AI will return throughout the SEMANTiCS program.
Tuesday: workshop day and the opening reception
Tuesday is the workshop day. The first thing on my schedule is the keynote by Ricardo Usbeck: More Than Data: Making Knowledge Graphs Work Together for Actionable Insights.
After the keynote, I will have to choose between 3 workshops that I want to follow:
- Semantics for Transport and Logistics. I once co-organized this workshop, so I am happy to see it being organized again. The program contains very relevant papers on transport data spaces, mappings, railway infrastructure knowledge graphs, permissions, and public transport data standards.
- The SEMANTiCS Developers Workshop. This workshop brings academic and industry developers together to show software and discuss open problems. The program includes SPARQL-RL, RDFLib, rudof, and Oxigraph.
- NXDG 2026, the NeXt-generation Data Governance workshop. This is closely related to my work in Trustflows on policies, provenance, usage control, and legally compliant data exchange.
In the evening, there is the opening reception. As local chair, I have the honor of showing everyone around the most beautiful city in the world. Ghent's deputy mayor for Digitalisation, Hafsa El-Bazioui, will welcome everyone to Ghent. She will explain why Ghent makes so much sense as the host city for SEMANTiCS. Did I mention that Ghent has a SPARQL endpoint?
Wednesday: opening the main conference
Opening the conference is a big honor for the local chair and probably our 30 minutes of fame. Together with the Knowledge on Web-Scale team, I am thrilled to welcome the SEMANTiCS audience to Ghent. I invited a former PhD student who is now a professional musician to do a musical intermezzo.
I also invited Tom Broos from Digitaal Vlaanderen to explain why Flanders, just like Ghent, is a front-runner in Linked Data. He will explain how the OSLO initiative and Trustflows are setting the scene for semantics in Flanders.
Juan Sequeda will give the keynote and I am sure he will not disappoint. Juan always comes with the hottest takes, and his keynote will probably be discussed during the rest of the day.
These are some other sessions I want to see:
- The industry talk on GRMP, an open-source platform for automatic monitoring of Linked Data resources on the Web. It uses Linked Data Event Streams, so I am curious to see the platform in action.
- The posters and demos session. This is always one of the highlights of the conference for me because the best interactions often happen there. I especially want to see LDES in action in the building sector.
- The invited talk on neurosymbolic AI. I will introduce the speaker. I believe that much of the field is now about neurosymbolic AI. Marta Sabou will also discuss the topic at the event on Monday, and I want to hear how the two presentations approach it from different angles.
- The fishbowl discussion on neuro-symbolic AI and agentic systems. I joined the fishbowl discussion last year as well. It is a format that makes room for direct discussion between speakers and the audience.
Thursday: more to follow
I will add my notes for Thursday after the conference. There is enough in the program that I first want to see where the discussions from Tuesday and Wednesday take me.
Friday: Belgian Data Spaces Day
On Friday, I will go to the Belgian Data Spaces Day in Brussels. The program brings together European policy updates, Belgian data space use cases, and a panel on what data spaces need to succeed. If you are still around after SEMANTiCS, you are welcome to join the event.
My contributions at SEMANTiCS2026
I co-authored a couple of papers at SEMANTiCS2026.