Hi!
I'm Ruben Taelman, a Web 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. Conference Streamlining governmental processes by putting citizens in control of their personal data
   Raf Buyle , Ruben Taelman , Katrien Mostaert , Geroen Joris , Erik Mannens , Ruben Verborgh , Tim Berners-Lee
   In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia
   More
2. Demo Discovering Data Sources in a Distributed Network of Heritage Information
   Miel Vander Sande , Sjors de Valk , Enno Meijers , Ruben Taelman , Herbert Van de Sompel , Ruben Verborgh
   In Proceedings of the Posters and Demo Track of the 15th International Conference on Semantic Systems
   More
3. Conference Triple Storage for Random-Access Versioned Querying of RDF Archives (Short version)
   Ruben Taelman , Miel Vander Sande , Joachim Van Herwegen , Erik Mannens , Ruben Verborgh
   In Proceedings of the 18th International Semantic Web Conference
   More
4. Demo Using an existing website as a queryable low-cost LOD publishing interface
   Brecht Van de Vyvere , Ruben Taelman , Pieter Colpaert , Ruben Verborgh
   In Proceedings of the 16th Extended Semantic Web Conference: Posters and Demos
   More
5. Position Statement Bridges between GraphQL and RDF
   Ruben Taelman , Miel Vander Sande , Ruben Verborgh
   In W3C Workshop on Web Standardization for Graph Data
   More