Work experience
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2012 – … : Ghent University–imec–IDLab
I started a PhD here in 2012 and graduated in 2017. After my PhD I started a post-doctoral researcher position. My team’s topics focus on publishing Linked Open Data for maximum reuse. Our experience includes, but is not limited to, use cases in the mobility sector (Open Planner Team, Mobilidata), smart cities (City of Things, Smart Flanders), e-governments (OSLO, LBLOD) or waste management (OVAM).
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2011 – 2012: FlatTurtle
As the CTO of FlatTurtle I worked on a digital signage product visualizing live data.
Education
- 2017 – PhD in Information Engineering Technology: “Publishing Transport Data for Maximum Reuse”
- 2012 – Master of Science Information Engineering Technology from Ghent University
Selection of top papers
- Verborgh, R., Vander Sande, M., Colpaert, P., Coppens, S., Mannens, E., & Van de Walle, R. (2014). Web-Scale Querying through Linked Data Fragments. Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Linked Data on the Web
- Colpaert, P., Van Compernolle, M., De Vocht, L., Dimou, A., Vander Sande, M., Verborgh, R., & Mannens, E. (2014). Quantifying the interoperability of open government datasets. Computer, 47(10), 50-56.
- Colpaert, P., Verborgh, R., & Mannens, E. (2017, June). Public Transit Route Planning Through Lightweight Linked Data Interfaces. In International Conference on Web Engineering (pp. 403-411).
- Colpaert, P., Van Compernolle, M., Walravens, N., Mechant, P., Adriaenssens, J., Ongenae, F., Verborgh, R., & Mannens, E. (2017). Open Transport Data for maximising reuse in multimodal route planners: a study in Flanders. IET Intelligent Transport Systems.
- Dimou, Anastasia, Miel Vander Sande, Pieter Colpaert, Ruben Verborgh, Erik Mannens, and Rik Van de Walle. "RML: A Generic Language for Integrated RDF Mappings of Heterogeneous Data." In LDOW. 2014.
Involved in these projects
| Name | Period | Description and impact |
| Westtoer tourism | 2012 | Westtoer advanced The DataTank. Tourism Open Data portal created http://datahub.westtoer.be |
| An experimental data publishing platform for ewi | 2012–2013 | Advanced The DataTank with a connection to the popular ckan, created the dcat-ap extension. Shaped the current features of The DataTank |
| Apps for Europe | 2012–2014 | Advanced The DataTank and was the first project to bring together various ... Apps for Ghent is still organized each year |
| Open Transport Net | 2014–2016 | A project on dcat, data portals and Open Transport Data. |
| Flemish Innovation Study for its.be | 2014–2017 | Setting up a data portal and advancing the datex2 specification towards a Linked Data ontology |
| An open data vision for the Department of Mobility and Public Works | 2015 | A first project to methodologically raise the impact and interoperability of datasets to be published at the Flemish government. |
| Local Decisions as Linked Data (LBLOD) | 2016 | Publishing local council decisions as Linked Data for administrative simplification. |
| The oasis team | 2016–2018 | Sharing experience between Ghent and Madrid on publishing Linked Data about public services and transport data. |
| Smart Roeselare | 2017 | Supporting the City of Roeselare with their Smart City vision to make more reuse of their data. |
| Raising the reuse of datasets maintained by the Flemish institute for the Sea | 2016–2017 | Towards an Open Sea Data innovation lab by making their data used and useful. |
| Smart Flanders | 2017–2020 | Supporting the 13 Flemish center cities and Brussels to publish real-time open data. |
| Open Planner Team | 2018–2019 | Building a client-side route planner by publishing Open Data as Linked Data Fragments. |
| City of Things VLAIO projects | 2018–2019 | Supporting 21 smart city projects by cities in Flanders. |
| OVAM Symbiose | 2018–2019 | Assisting OVAM with data reuse and the information architecture of their Web API. |
Academic involvement
As a researcher I am involved in the domains of Open Data, Semantic Web, Linked Data, Smart Cities and Transport data.
- Wrote a chapter on transport in State of Open Data (May 2019): stateofopendata.od4d.net
- Was a guest editor for a special issue on Open Data for the journal of Web Semantics (2018)
I also review papers for multiple conferences and workshops:
- International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE)
- SEMANTICS
- The Web Conference
- Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC)
- International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC)
I currently supervise 3 PhD students:
- Drs. Harm Delva – Joined our team in March 2019. Having a mathematician joining our team enforces our ability to think more fundamentally about the hypermedia structures we build on the server-side, as well the search algorithms we build on the client-side.
- Drs. Julián Rojas — Joined our team in May 2017. His focus is publishing transport data for maximum reuse.
- Drs. Brecht Van de Vyvere — Joined our team in January 2018. His expertise focuses on creating an open data knowledge graph for Flanders.
I also teach guest lectures on Web APIs and Open Data in the courses of: Ruben Verborgh (UGent), Sofie Van Hoecke (UGent), Pierre Deville (Solvay Business School) and Syntra West.
Public speaking
Open-source software contributions
- I have built and still maintain the iRail API (api.irail.be) at github.com/iRail
- I wrote a couple of Linked Data libraries for NodeJS and PHP such as LDFetch and hardf
- I wrote a translation script of GTFS to Linked Connections at github.com/linkedconnections
- I manage the developments of a client-side route planner at planner.js.org
Volunteering
I am a board member of the Belgian chapter of Open Knowledge. I co-founded the organization in 2012 to push for more Open Data. I started the yearly Open Belgium conference, started Open Data ideation events like Apps for Ghent. Because we wanted to go further than just ideas, in 2011 I started open Summer of code. Today it attracts over 100 students and coaches and is also organized in Spain. I still love the concept and participate as both a coach and client in the program. I get most of my energy from inspiring and enthusing these students.
Next to being a board member of the organization I still maintain the iRail codebase and its servers. Its goal is to republish data in an easy way for developers to create apps that can foster better lives for commuters in Belgium.
I also have other non-relevant to this CV hobbies such as cooking, playing the guitar, being a father, and so forth.