Developers Workshop (SemDev)

Workshop at ISWC 2025, November 2/3 2025

Abstract

Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph technologies have undoubtedly had a tremendous impact on today’s world. While academia and industry are both highly active in this field, there is often a disconnect between these two worlds. As such, there is a need to bring these two worlds closer together. The goal of this workshop is to provide a bridge between academia and industry in the form of a developers workshop. In this workshop, we invite developers of both worlds to present and discuss their software. Furthermore, by bringing people from academia and industry physically together, this workshop will provide a discussion ground for identifying open problems that are relevant to both sides. Besides putting a spotlight on Semantic Web software, the workshop aims to pinpoint opportunities for future research and implementations. This workshop is the spiritual successor to the highly-popular Developers Workshop that was organized at ESWC and ISWC between 2015 and 2016.

Workshop type: Novel

Proposed Length: Full-day

Motivation

In theory, the interplay between academia and industry is bidirectional. Industry informs academics about real-world problems that require novel solutions. Academics can then design novel algorithms as solutions, which they evaluate based on software prototypes. These research outcomes can then be picked up by industry, and become implemented in commercial products and services.

In practise, this interplay unfortunately does not flow as smooth as theorized. First, problems in industry do not always become apparent to the research community. This can cause real-world problems to not get picked up by researchers, or researchers coming up with solutions for which no real problem exists [1]. Second, the research outcomes that academics consider finished may still not be practical enough to be useful in industry [2]. Moving from a research prototype towards a technical-ready implementation can still require non-trivial problems to be solved, which can require additional research.

As such, there is a need for a common ground where academics and companies can discuss real-world problems, and gaps between research prototypes and technical-ready products. This workshop aims to fill this need, and is therefore relevant for researchers and industrial partners.

Topics

The core theme of this workshop concerns development efforts related to the Semantic Web, Knowledge Graphs, and Linked Data. An orthogonal goal is to connect academia and industry through these collective development efforts. Possible contributions include the following:

  • Web applications
  • Web APIs
  • browser extensions
  • libraries (client-side or server-side)
  • visualizations
  • user interfaces
  • end-user tools
  • development tools
  • data or ontology processors
  • application development (query engines, processors, reasoners, …)
  • implementations of the semantic web standards (including RDF-star and RDF/SPARQL 1.2)
  • …

Chairs

Ruben Taelman (ruben.taelman@ugent.be) is a postdoctoral researcher at IDLab, imec, Ghent University with a focus on investigating decentralized Web querying and publication techniques for Linked Data. To support his research, he develops various open source JavaScript libraries such as streaming RDF parsers and the Comunica engine to query Linked Data on the Web. He co-organized 1 workshop and 4 tutorials at Semantic Web conferences, and is co-lecturer for the Web Development course at Ghent University.

Jindřich Mynarz is a data engineering lead at MSD Czech Republic. His team supports effective use of data for pharmaceutical research via semantic web technologies, combining both commercial and open source software to build internal knowledge graphs or ontologies. Jindřich is an active user and contributor to open source libraries and tools built on semantic web standards. He completed a Ph.D. in applied computer science at the Prague University of Economics and Business, where he focused on using linked open data for public procurement.

Jerven Bolleman is the Principal Software Engineer of the Swiss-Prot group at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He is a co-responsible for managing the RDF representation of UniProt, a core Life-Science resource that hosts more than 210 billion triples in their public SPARQL endpoint. He also works on the SPARQL endpoints of Rhea and SwissLipids. Jerven, commits to RDF4j and fosters community uptake of RDF related standards in the lifesciences. He is also a co-organizer of SWAT4HCLS

Workshop Format

Besides standard projectors, this workshop will require booths or tables for demos in the afternoon. If possible, these booths/tables should be placed outside of the main workshop room.

This workshop will invite three types of contributions:

  1. Software talk: Participants can submit a short paper (5-6 pages, or ~2,000 words) they can present and (optionally) demonstrate at the workshop. We encourage hands-on presentations, such as live-coding.
  2. Software demo: Participants can submit a link to a software repository (that has a README) they can demonstrate at the workshop.
  3. Discussion topic: Participants can submit an abstract (short paragraph) to propose an interactive discussion topic.

While we allow PDF submissions for short papers, alternative formats are also encouraged, including self-hosted HTML pages. All accepted submissions will be included or linked to from our website. For authors that would like their submission to be included in the published PDF proceedings, a PDF meeting the CEUR requirements must be provided.

In the morning, we will have an invited talk (from Hannah Bast on the QLever SPARQL engine, pending invitation). Afterwards, accepted software talks will be presented. In the afternoon, the workshop will be more focused towards open discussions and interaction. During this time, accepted software demos (ideally in a separate room or hallway) will be held in parallel with the accepted discussion topics. As one discussion topic, we plan a panel discussion on bridging academia and industry. Depending on the number of discussion topics, we will split the group into breakout sessions. Each software demo will have a dedicated booth which the workshop participants can visit during or in-between the breakout sessions.

Review Policy

All contributions (talks, demos, topics) will be peer-reviewed by members of the program committee. Talks and demos will be reviewed based on the same criteria as the ISWC resources track, but the tools can be unfinished and not well-established yet. Discussion topics will be reviewed on relevance and potential for discussion. To foster continued discussions after the review round with program committee members, we will follow a fully open review policy through OpenReview.

Publication Policy

We will publish proceedings of the workshop at CEUR. This will include the short papers submitted as software talks. Submissions as software demo and discussion topic will be invited to optionally write a paper of at least five pages (requirement of CEUR) for inclusion in the proceedings.

Program Committee

We invite committee members from both industry and academia:

  • Adrian Gschwend (Zazuko)
  • Axel Polleres (Vienna University of Economics and Business - WU Wien)
  • Hala Skaf-Molli (University of Nantes - LS2N)
  • Jackson Morgan (O.team) (Confirmed)
  • Jesse Wright (Oxford University) (Confirmed)
  • Karel Klíma (Charles University, Prague) (Confirmed)
  • Katja Hose (TU Vienna)
  • Laurens Rietveld (Triply)
  • Miel Vander Sande (Meemoo) (Confirmed)
  • Olaf Hartig (Linköping University, Amazon) (Confirmed)
  • Pascal Molli (University of Nantes - LS2N)
  • Pierre-Antoine Champin (W3C)
  • Pieter Colpaert (Ghent University - imec) (Confirmed)
  • Richard Cyganiak (TopQuadrant)
  • Thomas Bergwinkl (TopQuadrant) (Confirmed)
  • Thomas Tanon (Helsing) (confirmed) (Confirmed)
  • Tobias Kuhn (VU University Amsterdam)
  • Wouter Beek (Triply)
  • Jose Emilio Labra (University of Oviedo, Spain) (Confirmed)
  • Luis Galarraga (INRIA/IRISA) (Confirmed)
  • Thi Hoang Thi Pham (University of Nantes - LS2N) (Confirmed)

Audience and Community

The Developers Workshop from 2015-2016 was popular, and attracted more than 70 participants during the conference. That workshop had different organizers, so this workshop is not a strict continuation. The 2015 Developers Workshop at ESWC had 15 accepted software presentations and 5 interactive discussions. Given that no workshops with a similar focus have been organized at ISWC and ESWC for nearly ten years, we foresee a high interest with novel software that accumulated during these years that are not ready for the ISWC resources track, but would be relevant in a more focussed format at this developers’ workshop.