The Fourth International Workshop
on Semantics in Dataspaces
(SDS 2026)

Workshop Overview

Dataspaces have gained their rightful momentum, not only through regulatory initiatives such as the European Data Governance Act (DGA) but also through their increasing adoption in industrial ecosystems worldwide. The DGA defines key roles such as data and service providers and establishes a regulatory framework that enables trustworthy, sovereign, and fair data sharing. It explicitly promotes the development of common European dataspaces and aims to make data more widely available for research, economic innovation, and societal benefit.

In parallel with these political developments, industry sectors are actively working on the construction of dataspaces in various research projects to support real-world use cases. Manufacturing, mobility, energy systems, and construction networks are increasingly trying to adopt federated data architectures to optimize value creation and enable new data-driven services. In large-scale industrial settings, such as Gigafactories in battery and semiconductor production, highly heterogeneous machines, suppliers, digital twins, and process data must interact seamlessly. Robust and interoperable dataspaces are becoming essential building blocks for ensuring scalability, efficiency, and resilience in these complex environments.

Despite this growing uptake, substantial scientific challenges remain. Semantic interoperability, in particular, continues to be one of the most critical and unresolved issues: data must be interpretable not only syntactically but also semantically across domains, systems, and organizational boundaries. The FAIR data principles, originating from the semantics community, have played an important role in shaping this understanding and are now mandated for European dataspaces. Yet, there is still a lack of mature methods, standards, and tooling capable of delivering automated, scalable, and context-aware semantic integration, especially in industrial and cross-domain scenarios.

Recognizing these challenges, our workshop series has, over the past years, played an active role in shaping the emerging research agenda. One key outcome has been the creation of the W3C Dataspaces Community Group, which provides an open forum for discussing challenges and best practices for dataspaces. This demonstrates the growing relevance of the topic within the Semantic Web community and the need for sustained collaboration.

For these reasons, dataspaces are of great importance to the Semantic Web community and are predicted to have a significant influence on a wide range of application areas. Research on ontologies, knowledge representation, Linked Data, semantic data access and integration, semantic mapping, data quality, and trust will therefore be crucial for realizing sustainable and interoperable dataspaces at scale. Thus, this workshop aims to foster an interactive and collaborative environment, combining focused presentations with extensive discussions to explore open challenges, emerging solutions, and future research directions.

Submission

Important: 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.

• Research papers evaluating a solution to a challenge (10-15 pages).
• Short research or position papers discussing existing or newly proposed challenges, or a position on how a challenge should be tackled (5-9 pages).
• Use case papers may contain descriptions of implementations of dataspaces, prototypes, demos, or software systems (5-9 pages).
• An extended abstract with 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).

Strictly follow the rules for LLM generated text and AI assistance in general by the ESWC guidelines and the CEUR-WS guidelines.

Workshop papers must be self-contained and in English. They should not have been previously published, should not be considered for publication, and should not be under review for another workshop, conference, or journal. We use a traditional peer review process, so blind submission is not required. 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.

Please submit your contributions via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sds20260

• General ESWC submission guidelines
• Overleaf-template for submission to SDS26 (based on single-column LNCS, tailored for the CEUR-WS proceedings)
• Template ZIP download for offline use

Diversity as Key for Innovation

We believe that research and innovation is enriched and furthered by a multitude of perspectives. Hence, we want to create an inclusive, respectful workshop environment. We invite all individuals to participate regardless of age, education, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, physical appearance, or gender presentation. This applies to all aspects, for example, we welcome all operating systems, quality of computer hardware, open-minded political orientation, and appropriate English skills. Inclusion drives us forward every day.