SEMANTICS 2026 Developers Workshop

Colocated with Semantics 2026 on September 15 (half day) in Ghent, Belgium

Bringing academia and industry closer through software

While academia and industry are active in the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph domains, there is often a disconnect between these two worlds. 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.

In contrast to our contribution-driven format last year, we will follow a more discussion-oriented format this year, based on feedback from participants last year. Concretely, this means that we will not accept any traditional scientific paper submissions. Instead, we will invite developers from industry and academia to present their software within the first half of this workshop. In the second half, we will have group discussions based on the discussion topics raised within these presentations or by participants.

Program

Program is not final yet, and might still change!
Time Topic
10:30 - 10:40 👋 Welcome and introduction
10:40 - 11:00 Developing SHACL Rules - specs, tests and code
Andy Seaborne (Apache Jena maintainer, SPARQL editor)

SHACL Rules is an emerging W3C standard. This talk will introduce SHACL Rules and show how a user-centric code development approach has led to the specification.
11:00 - 11:20 RDFLib: Everything RDF, done!
Tom De Nies, Nicholas Car (RDFLib for Python maintainers)

An overview and the origins of the RDFLib Python RDF manipulation toolkit. Also, the roles the toolkit plays in the Semantic Web community, what we can expect to see coming soon and what developers want to see. We will also ask for further participation in its maintenance and growth.
11:20 - 11:40 rudof: A Semantic-less tool for the Semantic Web
Jose Emilio Labra Gayo, Samuel Bustamante Larriet, Álvaro García Fernández (rudof maintainers, ShEx editor)

In this talk we introduce rudof, a tool built to help practitioners elevate the quality of their graph data. Supporting plain RDF, RDF 1.2, and property graphs, rudof brings description and validation to the ecosystem via ShEx, SHACL, DCTAP and PGSchema. It also implements some features to get information from nodes, run SPARQL queries, visualize graphs and shapes, and generate synthetic data from shapes. Written in Rust, it offers cross-platform binaries (Windows, Linux, macOS), Python bindings and an MCP server. It aims to give Semantic Web developers focus on the structural shapes of their graphs, independent from their underlying semantics.

11:40 - 12:00 Oxigraph and the wider OLAP database ecosystem
Thomas Tanon (Oxigraph maintainer, SPARQL editor)

The past years has seen the creation of modular database building blocks like Arrow, Parquet, Velox, DataFusion... Can we take advantage of them to build better RDF and SPARQL implementations able to run faster on large amount of data and enable new data integration use cases?
🍽️ Break
13:00 - 14:30 Discussion: Based on topics raised within earlier presentations or by participants.

Participate

The workshop is open to attend for everyone who has registered to the SEMANTiCS conference, either through physical or online participation.

In contrast to last year, do not accept any traditional scientific paper submissions, but instead, will invite speakers.

We are planning one (or multiple) collaborative publications as outcome of the discussions for interested participants, which will be published as proceedings afterwards.

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.

Relevant topics include the following:

Organization

Chairs

Previous editions