Shaping Knowledge Graphs and rudof at ISWC'24

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the International Semantic Web Conference 2024, in Baltimore, Maryland.

I presented a tutorial titled Shaping Knowledge Graphs divided in two parts, one part about ShEx and SHACL, and a second part about how to extend the ideas from ShEx and SHACL to other types of knowledge graphs like Wikidata or Wikibase, Labeled property graphs and even the new RDF Star or RDF 1.2. Although the tutorial was one of the first events of the conference, the attendance was good and the questions were nice, making it interactive. The slides of the tutorial are available at the web page: https://www.validatingrdf.com/tutorial/iswc2024

Later, I also participated in the Posters & Demo session where I presented a demo about rudof, the new tool that we are developing at WESO, which is a RUST-based library that can be used to handle RDF, SPARQL, ShEx, SHACL, DCTAP, etc.

During the conference, I had the opportunity to meet Jennifer Woodward-Greene , with whom we are collaborating for a project about creating shapes for the United States Department of Agriculture using the NALT Concept space. Jennifer is also collaborating in the SOCKG (Soil Organic Carbon Knowledge Graph, which was also presented by Nasim Mahdavi in a Workshop organized by the Prototype Open Knowledge Network (Proto-OKN) initiative. It was really great for me to meet them and to attend some of the presentations during that workshop, where I could see how the NSF is investing on the development of Knowledge Graphs. The Keynote talk by Chaitan Baru was also about that network. One of the challenges seems to be the interoperability between those knowledge graphs, for which I think publishing shapes could be very helpful.

I also attended the Keynote from Ora Lassila about Semantic Web and AI: Can we finally realize the original vision? and had the chance to talk with him about the work on shaping knowledge graphs. It is really great to be able to talk with one of the Founding Fathers of the Semantic Web and to realize that I fully agree with his vision as well as the need to unify efforts on creating good schema languages for graph languages that can be compatible with RDF (RDF 1.2) and property graphs.

During the conference, I could also talk with a lot of colleagues like Aidan Hogan , Katja Hose , Daniel Hernández , Pablo Mendes , Juan Sequeda , Oscar Corcho , Pascal Hitzler , Antoine Zimmermann , Vincent Emonet , Blerina Spahiu , Jim Balhoff , Riccardo Tommasini , Axel Polleres , Maxime Jakubowski , George Konstantinidis , Nicolas Ferranti , Maria Angela Pellegrino , etc. as well as meeting new people like J. Allen Baron , Asiyah Lin , Oktie Hassanzadeh , Lorena Etcheverry , etc. (I am sure I forget someone here...). The truth is that attending these conference in person is an invaluable aspect and one of the greatest experiences one can have if one is interested in the Semantic Web.

Next year, the conference will be in Nara, Japan...let's see if I have the opportunity (and the funding) to attend it. By the way, I was gladly surprised to be nominated with a Honorable mention as one of the Outstanding PC members. I think it is great that the conference gives those awards because the labour that PC members do is really important for conferences and is not always taken into account...so I upload here the slide with the other members that have been awarded.