Hi!
I'm Ruben Taelman, a Web postdoctoral researcher at IDLab,
with a focus on decentralization, Linked Data publishing and querying.

My goal is to make data accessible for everyone by providing
intelligent infrastructure and algorithms for data publication and retrieval.

To support my research, I develop various open source JavaScript libraries such as streaming RDF parsers and the Comunica engine to query Linked Data on the Web.
As this website itself contains Linked Data, you can query it live with Comunica.

Have a look at my publications or projects
and contact me if any of those topics interest you.

Latest blog posts

• Who says using RDF is hard?
  A brief overview on RDF and Linked Data development in JavaScript.
  6 October 2019
  

  The Linked Data ecosystem and RDF as its graph data model have been around for many years already. Even though there is an increasing interest in knowledge graphs, many developers are scared off by RDF due to its reputation of being complicated. In this post, I will show some concrete examples on how RDF can be used in JavaScript applications, to illustrate that RDF is actually pretty easy to work with if you use the right tools.

• A story of streaming RDF parsers
  How I implemented streaming JSON-LD and RDF/XML parsers in JavaScript.
  13 March 2019
  

  Multiple serialization formats are currently being recommended by the W3C to represent RDF. JSON-LD and RDF/XML are examples of RDF serializations that are respectively based on the JSON and XML formats. The ability to parse RDF serializations in a streaming way offers many advantages, such as handling huge documents with only a limited amount of memory, and processing elements as soon as they are parsed. In this post, I discuss the motivation behind my streaming parser implementations for JSON-LD and RDF/XML, their architecture, and I show some live examples.

Highlighted publications

1. Conference Comunica: a Modular SPARQL Query Engine for the Web
   Ruben Taelman , Joachim Van Herwegen , Miel Vander Sande , Ruben Verborgh
   In Proceedings of the 17th International Semantic Web Conference
   More
2. Journal Triple Storage for Random-Access Versioned Querying of RDF Archives
   Ruben Taelman , Miel Vander Sande , Joachim Van Herwegen , Erik Mannens , Ruben Verborgh
   In Journal of Web Semantics
   More
3. Journal Generating Public Transport Data based on Population Distributions for RDF Benchmarking
   Ruben Taelman , Pieter Colpaert , Erik Mannens , Ruben Verborgh
   In Semantic Web Journal
   More
4. Conference Continuous Client-Side Query Evaluation over Dynamic Linked Data
   Ruben Taelman , Ruben Verborgh , Pieter Colpaert , Erik Mannens
   In The Semantic Web: ESWC 2016 Satellite Events, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May 29 – June 2, 2016, Revised Selected Papers
   More

Latest publications

1. Demo PROV4ITDaTa: Transparent and direct transfer of personal data to personal stores
   Gertjan De Mulder , Ben De Meester , Pieter Heyvaert , Ruben Taelman , Ruben Verborgh , Anastasia Dimou
   In WWW2021, the International World Wide Web Conference
   More
2. Journal Semantic micro-contributions with decentralized nanopublication services
   Tobias Kuhn , Ruben Taelman , Vincent Emonet , Haris Antonatos , Stian Soiland-Reyes , Michel Dumontier
   In PeerJ Computer Science
   More
3. Workshop Optimizing Approximate Membership Metadata in Triple Pattern Fragments for Clients and Servers
   Ruben Taelman , Joachim Van Herwegen , Miel Vander Sande , Ruben Verborgh
   In Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems
   More
4. Workshop RDF Test Suite: Improving Developer Experience for Building Specification-Compliant Libraries
   Ruben Taelman
   In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on The Semantic Web in Practice: Tools and Pedagogy
   More
5. Conference LDflex: a Read/Write Linked Data Abstraction for Front-End Web Developers
   Ruben Verborgh , Ruben Taelman
   In Proceedings of the 19th International Semantic Web Conference
   More