The European Economic Area is one of the best use cases for (semantic) data integration: the many different languages, legislations, rules and systems must be or become interoperable! On October 8 and 9, 2025, I attended the 3rd European Data Conference on Reference Data and Semantics (ENDORSE) in the European Commission’s building Charlemagne in Brussels, Belgium.

In the old days, research was done by famous individuals. Nowadays, research is a team effort! Working together requires making agreements about how to collaborate and using common tools. These kinds of agreements (or standards) and tools are especially crucial given the amount of data nowadays.

What do the books “The invention of Nature” and “De uitvinder van de natuur” have in common? Well, they are both different versions of the same work “The invention of nature” by Andrea Wulf, whether it is in a different format or a different language. In this blog post I will briefly introduce the advantages of keeping work-level records in library catalogs.

It is difficult to foster innovation and perform high quality research when the underlying data is not accessible and usable. Data and data services should be offered via so-called research data infrastructures , think of user-friendly web platforms, repositories, and databases.

With the Resource Description Framework (RDF) you can represent Linked Data as subject-predicate-object triples. But what if you have to represent additional context of those triples? In this Blog post I will briefly introduce the advanced data management feature “named graphs” with two examples: different data source named graphs in the BELTRANS project and different story-contexts for Digital Humanities research.

In June 2023 I attended a workshop in Hasselt, Belgium, organized by a research network on Knowledge Graphs and Data Integration. Linked Data-based systems and declarative SPARQL queries somehow magically do all the work efficiently, but how? For many people, presentations about using Linked Data and SPARQL already seem very technical. But this event went further, it covered the fundamental algorithms that power the Linked Data systems!

This year we had the honor to host the 10th anniversary edition of the DHBenelux conference at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR). In this blog post I will reflect on the different sessions I’ve attended at this year’s multitrack edition of DHBenelux 2023.

More and more data is created, but meaningfully answer questions with this data is not straightforward because we need a shared understanding of what the different data means and how it relates.

A side note: This post describes my PhD work from the perspective of June 2020. The actual finished PhD in 2022 was slightly different in comparison. It is particularly challenging to explain PhD research to family and friends, especially in an abstract field such as Computer Science. In the following blog post I will try to explain my PhD, freed from academic precision and more from the big picture and with plenty of examples.

At the end of November 2019 I could visit the sunny California to attend the Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-Cap). A lot of interesting workshops, tutorials and talks covered topics such as the representation of knowledge in Wikidata, approaches to transform tabular data to Linked Data, or the representation of scientific literature and processes as Knowledge Graphs. Additionally I could present our work on MontoloStats.

In the last week of October 2019 I attended the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in Auckland, New Zealand. I had the honor to present my PhD plan at the ISWC Doctoral Consortium. In this blog post I talk a bit about the conference and focus on a few presentations I found particular interesting or relevant for my PhD regarding guidelines for the design and use of ontologies.