Linked Data & Solid

Pieter Colpaert is professor aan de Universiteit Gent en verbonden aan imec – IDLab. Hij doet onderzoek naar kostenefficiënte en onderhoudbare Linked Data Web API's. In 2012 was hij medeoprichter van een non-profitorganisatie om Open Knowledge in België te promoten, en vandaag is hij lid van de raad van bestuur van Open Knowledge Belgium. Hij behaalde zijn doctoraat in 2017 aan de Universiteit Gent met de titel “Publishing Transport Data for maximum reuse” waarin hij schetste hoe web-API's kunnen worden ontworpen om de data-integratie volledig te automatiseren, wat hij toepaste op de routeplanning van het openbaar vervoer. Tijdens zijn doctoraat werkte hij echter ook aan andere verticals binnen het e-gov domein, slimme steden, administratieve vereenvoudiging en Open Data in het algemeen. Tijdens zijn postdoc-periode was hij technologiecoördinator van het programma Smart Flanders. In 2021 werd Pieter benoemd tot professor aan de Universiteit Gent in Knowledge on Web-Scale, waar hij Big Data Science en data-architectuur doceerde.

Hello! My name is Pieter Heyvaert (he/him) and I'm a development lead, developer advocate, and diversity & inclusion ambassador at Ghent University - IDLab, imec. I obtained the degree of Doctor of Computer Science Engineering in 2019 from Ghent University, after obtaining the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science Engineering in 2014 at the same university.

My interests are in the scope of the Semantic Web. More specific, my PhD research focused on improving the effectiveness of the creation and execution of knowledge graph generation rules. I contributed to more than 25 publications, including papers at international conferences and articles in international journals. Furthermore, I'm keen on deploying Semantic Web technologies in my own side projects, such as the websites that I develop and the datasets that I publish. Don't hesitate to have a look at my publications and the technologies I help developing if you want to learn more.

I'm a data interoperability and Semantic Web researcher at IDLab (which makes me part of both IMEC and Ghent University). My research has focused mainly on the design of cost-efficient system architectures for scalable and interoperable data exchange at Web scale. I've had the opportunity of applying the results of my research mainly on the transportation domain, including public transport, logistics and infrastructure. However I've always aimed at desgining generic solutions that can be also applied and facilitate data exchange in various domains.

Linked Data Architect at movias

Esther is Business Developer & Operational Director at SolidLab (imec), a cutting-edge center of expertise on bringing personal and smart data spaces alive across all levels of interoperability: legal, organizational, semantic, and technical. Together with athumi (the Flemish Data Utility Company), we foster the adoption of semantic standards for data sharing in impactful real-live use cases in Flanders, Europe and across the globe.

Expertise: software engineering, complex systems, computer architecture

My name is Ruben Taelman. I am a postdoctoral researcher at IDLab, imec, Ghent University with a focus on investigating decentralized Web querying and publication techniques for Linked Data.

My goal is to bring query execution over the Web closer to the end-user, so that people become more empowered in how they can find and use data. To enable this, I focus on the research area of query execution over decentralized environments.

The Web and programming in general have always been a great fascination for me, as can be seen from the different projects I am working on. I am a proponent of openness, which is why I aim to open-source all my projects whenever possible.

To spread my passion for the Web to the broader world, I am a co-lecturer of the Web Development course at Ghent University, where I teach students about topics such as Web Browsers and Web Scripting. These lectures follow the flipped classroom model, where all videos and other materials are available online for free.

Next to my main job as a researcher, I also take up small freelancing tasks during my free time.

I am David Chaves-Fraga, assistant professor at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC, Spain). I am also a researcher at the Center for research in Intelligent Technologies (CiTIUS@USC) and research collaborator at the Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence Group (DTAI) at KU Leuven, Belgium. I am a former researcher at the Ontology Engineering Group (OEG) at Technical University of Madrid (UPM) where I hold my PhD with my thesis "Knowledge Graph Construction from Heterogeneous Data Sources Exploiting Declarative Mapping Rules" in July 2021. My main research lines are focused on the optimization and evaluation of data integration systems, mainly the construction of Knowledge Graphs from (semi)structured sources using declarative mapping rules.

As I really believe that research is a collaborative task, I'm continuously trying to contribute to my research community. For that reason, I'm currently co-chairing the W3C community group for Knowledge Graph Construction, I organize two workshop series (KGC and Sem4Tra) and several tutorials in semantic web conferences about the same topic. Additionally, I have been the main coordinator of Open Summer of Code in Spain from 2018 to 2021, a formative, international, and innovative program for undergrad and master students.

My name is Dylan Van Assche, I'm an Industrial Engineer in electronics-ICT and a PhD student & Researcher in Computer Science at IDLab Ghent. My research focuses on Knowledge Graph generation and Linked Open Data to decentralize the Web once again!

Besides my research, I spend my free time programming applications and tools, 3D printing and working on my modelrailroad. I'm also advocating for publishing everything as Open Source since we can always learn from each other by sharing your ideas and tricks.

Expertise: linked data, semantic web, knowledge graph generation

Laurens is a Software Developer with experience in building microservices following the DevOps principles, using modern cloud-native technologies like Docker, Kubernetes and Spring Boot. While obtaining his Bachelor in Computer Science he first learned about the Solid Project, and has since gathered experience with the technology both in server-side contexts as well as in client-side applications. In the context of his thesis he researched ways to adapt the Solid specification to enterprise settings, while retaining the original principles of data governance and interoperability at the heart of the project. Currently, Laurens is active as ICT Solution Architect overseeing a five person development team realizing production-ready Solid use-cases for the Digitaal Vlaanderen and advises the Flemish Data Utility Company on the Solid specification.

I am a professor of Data analytics for Health and Connected care, at the IDLab research group of Ghent University. I am part of the PREDICT (http://predict.idlab.ugent.be/) and KnoWS (https://knows.idlab.ugent.be/) research teams. These teams perform research into hybrid AI (fusing semantic models and machine learning), explainable AI, expressive semantic reasoning and the incorporation of expert knowledge in data analytics. This research is mainly applied to the domains of predictive healthcare and industry 4.0 in order to realize context-aware and personalized decision support systems.

I work at the IDLab research group as a postdoctoral researcher. My main passion is fostering collaboration with societal and industrial partners in interdisciplinary projects to valorize our research toward truly impactful applications. This is realized through a number of (government sponsored) projects, for which I set up and lead the trajectory from proposal, into project management and valorization and dissemination afterwards. My main research and project focus is on the use of Semantic Web technologies, machine learning & IoT for the delivery of personalized & context-aware services, especially within the eHealth domain. I am also particularly interested in methodologies for capturing domain knowledge from experts & using this knowledge to optimize intelligent agents and the way we interact with them.

Professor Pieter Bonte is an assistant professor at KU Leuven, campus Kulak, specialising in the efficient processing of Internet of Things (IoT) data using various branches of Artificial Intelligence (AI). His research primarily focuses on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, with core expertise in semantic reasoning and knowledge graphs.