SemSys at ESWC2025
SemSys representatives (Alex, Fajar, Katrin, Majlinda, Marta) attended the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) 2025 with the title Empowering Knowledge through Semantics: From Knowledge Graphs to Neurosemantics on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in Portorož, Slovenia, from June 1st to 5th. The program included keynotes, talks and workshops on the latest scientific results and technology innovations around semantic technologies, with an increasing share of neuro-symbolic approaches.
The conference kicked off with a keynote by Raphaël Troncy who reflected on the developments around knowledge graphs in the last 20 years and discussed semantic technologies in a future with foundation models, vector databases and large-scale machine learning. He sees knowledge graphs as an important building block of future AI systems, complementary to large language models, e.g. to personalize storytelling by language models, to capture connections between concepts or to represent different perspectives.
Leonid Libkin held a keynote on the progress of standardization of query languages for property graphs. He presented recent research results regarding deficiencies of the query languages, as well as a roadmap for future developments.
The conference ended with a keynote by Sonja Zillner on responsible AI engineering, in which she covered technical and legal challenges of generative AI, and gave insights into the risk management of generative AI applications in the context of the product lifecycle management process at Siemens.
Marta served as a chair for Workshops & Tutorials. Additionally, she and Fajar each chaired a session: Marta on Semantic Technologies, and Fajar on Shapes, Constraints, and Validation, respectively.
Multiple members of SemSys presented their recent work in different workshops, starting with Katrin with the paper “Exploring LLMs for Causal Discovery in Cyber-Physical Systems” in the CausalNeSy workshop.
Majlinda presented our paper “From Experts to LLMs: Evaluating the Quality of Automatically Generated Ontologies” in the ELMKE workshop, in parallel to Fajar who presented “FrOG: Framework of Open GraphRAG” in the TEXT2KG workshop. Later on the same day, he also presented our work “Towards Supporting AI System Engineering with an Extended Boxology Notation” in the KG-STAR workshop. Alex networked with the new generation of PhD students in the PhD symposium of his first conference.
In addition to busy networking, we met a lot of familiar faces, among them our colleagues from the Vienna University of Economics and Business, as well as long-standing collaborators from industry.
