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Nanopublication Tutorial at ESWC 2025

This tutorial is part of ESWC 2025 taking place on 1-5 June 2025 in Portoroz, Slovenia.

Abstract​

Nanopublications are a rapidly growing technology, fully based on Semantic Web standards and principles. At this tutorial, participants are introduced to the concept and then immediately get hands-on experience in creating and publishing their own nanopublications as well as querying and using the available content. The tutorial covers how to create nanopublications manually via web forms and automatically via software libraries, how to retrieve published nanopublications from the decentralized network, how to craft own web forms via templates, how to query the network with SPARQL, and how trust and communities are handled. Moreover, participants get brief introductions into a selection of existing systems and approaches that are based on this technology. The attendees will get supervision and advice from the core people driving the nanopublication technology, and will have time during the tutorial to make some first concrete steps in applying it to their areas of interest. At the end, attendees will have a comprehensive basic foundation on the theory and practice of nanopublication technology.

Objectives and Scope​

The objective of this tutorial is to give attendees the skills needed to work with nanopublications, along with the knowledge on how they may be applied in scientific work. This tutorial will briefly cover the conceptual framework and motivation, and then focus on providing practical hands-on experience on the usage of nanopublications, covering the whole data lifecycle from creating nanopublications to connecting, querying, combining, and reusing them.

This will be the first nanopublication tutorial of this kind. The tutorial material, including the slides, will be created in early 2025. For that, we can build upon the content of numerous presentations, seminar sessions, and publications we have authored on the topic. Our plan is to make the tutorial material easy to update, so we can reuse it later to organize further editions of this nanopublication tutorial at other occasions in the future.

Target Audience and Learning Goals​

The target audience are Semantic Web researchers and developers, and generally anyone interested in the technical aspects of nanopublications.

The learning goals are the following:

  • Participants know the motivation and vision behind nanopublications
  • Participants know the technical basis of nanopublications and how they relate to other semantic technologies
  • Participants can create their own nanopublications, via the Nanodash user interface as well as programmatically
  • Participants know how to publish and query nanopublications
  • Participants know the basics of how to create their own nanopublication templates
  • Participants understand how agents are identified and trusted on the decentralized nanopublication network
  • Participants have made their first steps in using nanopublications for a small project of their choosing

Schedule Outline​

A detailed schedule will be published soon. The tutorial day will include sessions on the following topics:

  • What are nanopublications?
  • Creating and publishing nanopublications
  • Creating nanopublication templates
  • Querying nanopublications
  • Applications
  • Trust and communities
  • Individual projects

Presenters / Organizers​

Tobias Kuhn​

Tobias Kuhn is Assistant Professor at VU University Amsterdam, and more recently CTO at the start-up Knowledge Pixels. He is one of the main drivers behind the nanopublication technology and community, having published more than 15 peer-reviewed articles on nanopublications and having led the development of nanopublication software such as nanopub-java and Nanodash. He has also extensive experience with tutoring and lecturing, having organized and taught more than 30 courses at university level over the last 20 years on topics including knowledge organization and information retrieval.

Barbara Magagna​

Barbara Magagna is the FAIR Development and Fellowship Coordinator at GO FAIR Foundation (GFF) with a background in landscape ecology, GIS and semantics. She is trainer of the 3-Point FAIRification Framework, for which she developed core components. Nanopublications are at the core of GFF’s Capacity Building Programme leveraging the documentation of FAIR Supporting Resources. Within European projects (ENVRI, eLTER, PARC, FAIR2Adapt) she helps to assess FAIRness of data and services and to develop semantic frameworks (I-ADOPT).

Vincent Emonet​

Vincent Emonet is a senior researcher at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), specializing in semantic web technologies, data integration, and scientific knowledge representation. He has extensive experience in teaching and supervision, having co-organized numerous workshops and tutorials around the topics of the FAIR data principles in general and nanopublications in particular. Vincent is dedicated to empowering scientists with practical skills and tools for managing and sharing structured scientific knowledge. His work has led to many scientific papers on the topic and he has made significant contributions to fostering collaboration and reproducibility in the life sciences.

Piotr Sowiński​

Piotr Sowiński is a PhD student at the Warsaw University of Technology and a co-founder of the start-up NeverBlink. His work revolves around the topics of Knowledge Graphs, streaming, and distributed systems. He is currently leading two community initiatives that use nanopublications: RiverBench (with structured reporting of RDF benchmarks), and the RDF Stream Taxonomy (with a living literature review of RDF streaming). He also contributes to the open source projects powering the nanopublication ecosystem. Since 2022 Piotr has been teaching hands-on classes about Knowledge Graphs for graduate students.

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