Call for Papers: 4th workshop on semantics in dataspaces at ESWC2026

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*Dear dataspaces community member,*

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Great news: we’re going to organize another edition of our key event, 
where we welcome contributions on the challenges we defined!


To that extent, I cleaned up the issues on Github and now published a 
draft report of the challenges we’ve been discussing so far: 
https://w3c-cg.github.io/dataspaces/


I don’t believe this list of challenges is complete yet. It would be 
great if you could take a look at it, and pull request (or open an 
issue) the ones you would feel are lacking?


You can find our call for papers for this event below - can you help 
sharing this in your networks?


Thank you in advance!


Pieter Colpaert


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The 4th workshop on Semantics in Dataspaces (SDS 2026) will take place 
on the 10th or 11th of May 2026, to be held in conjunction with ESWC26 
in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

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*https://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/SDS26/ <https://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/SDS26/>*

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— Important Dates —

Submission: March 3d, 2026

Notification of acceptance: March 31, 2026

Camera-Ready submission: April 15, 2026

Workshop day: Full day on May 10th or 11th, 2026


— Workshop Overview —


Trustworthy data sharing within dataspaces requires semantic 
interoperability, for which the Semantic Web community has a long 
history of developing RDF-based solutions. The Semantic Web Dataspaces 
(SDS) 2026 workshop will serve as a platform to bring together 
researchers and practitioners in this area. Through an academic 
discussion about challenges and use cases, the workshop aims to advance 
the state of the art in semantics for dataspaces in close collaboration 
with the W3C Dataspaces Community Group.


— Topics of Interest defined by the W3C community group —


There are 2 topics of interest:

 1.

    work that advances our understanding of one or multiple of the
    documented challenges, and

 2.

    dataspace use cases and implementations.


The W3C dataspaces community group maintains a list of 6 (at the time of 
writing) dataspace challenges at https://w3c-cg.github.io/dataspaces/ 
<https://w3c-cg.github.io/dataspaces/>with related work from previous 
editions that should be taken into account.

Feel free to PR your own specific topic in case you believe that this 
should also be a core challenge discussed in the dataspaces CG.

Authors must indicate in their submission what challenge is being 
discussed and link to the challenge. In case it’s a use case paper, this 
must also be indicated and then of course there is no challenge to be 
linked.

— Submission —

We welcome the following types of contributions:

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    Research papersevaluating a solution to a challenge (10-15 pages).

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    Short research or position papers discussing existing or newly
    proposed challenges, or a position on how a challenge should be
    tackled (5-9 pages).

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    Use case papersmay contain descriptions of implementations of
    dataspaces, prototypes, demos, or software systems (5-9 pages).

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    An extended abstractwith a talk description of an existing paper
    (e.g., a journal or a paper at another conference) you want to
    present in the scope of a challenge. The paper in this case contains
    the abstract, link to the existing publication, and elaborates on
    its relevance for the conference (~2 pages, leading to a citation in
    the preface of the proceedings).


Workshop papers must be self-contained and in English. They should not 
have been previously published, nor be under review for another 
workshop, conference, or journal. Papers must be submitted according to 
the ESWC submission guidelines. The PDF files must have all non-standard 
fonts embedded. Papers will be evaluated according to their 
significance, originality, technical content, style, clarity, and 
relevance to the workshop.


— Workshop Chairs —

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    Paul Moosmann, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

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    Pieter Colpaert, Ghent University, Belgium

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    André Pomp, University of Wuppertal, Germany

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    Edward Curry, University of Galway, Ireland

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    Stefan Decker, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

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    Alexander Paulus, University of Wuppertal, Germany

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    Anikó Gerencsér, Publications Office of the European Union


— Contact —


All questions should be emailed to sds@dbis.rwth-aachen.de 
<mailto:sds@dbis.rwth-aachen.de>.

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