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.



Topics of Interest

The W3C dataspaces community group maintains a list of challenges. These challenges are the topics of the core contributions. Next to a core contribution, we also welcome more general and use case papers discussing:

State-of-the-art Implementations: Semantics for Dataspaces:


Submission

Important: Integration with the W3C Dataspaces Community Group: To foster collaboration and create a lasting impact, authors must align their work with the ongoing efforts of the W3C Dataspaces Community Group, as documented in the GitHub issues repository. This integration will promote consistency, reusability, and collective progress in addressing the core challenges of dataspaces. Authors are required to identify which generic challenge their paper addresses within this repository, and explicitly highlight this in their paper. If the challenge is not listed, they must contribute by adding it to the repository. Use cases are encouraged but must also be documented in the GitHub repository to ensure they contribute to a shared knowledge base. Please note that papers that do not clearly integrate with the W3C Community Group’s ongoing efforts, including the identification of a relevant challenge or use case in the repository, may be subject to desk rejection.

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

We welcome the following types of contributions (see “Rules for papers in the proceedings” at CEUR-WS for more information). All page limits include references.

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.

Important Dates

Submission      March 03, 2026
Notification of acceptance      April 03, 2026
Camera-Ready submission      April 15, 2026
Workshop at ESWC 2026      Full day on May 10 or May 11, 2026
Registration      Please visit the ESWC 2026 registration page

All submission deadlines are end-of-day in the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.


Participation and Publication

The ESWC 2026 is a 100% in person conference. All presenters (keynotes, papers, etc.) need to be physically present, no virtual presentations are allowed. We however encourage additional participants to join the workshop.

Workshop papers will be included in an Open Access publication all indexed by all relevant services such as Scopus or Google Scholar. Pre-prints of all contributions will be made available during the conference.

Workshop Chairs

Program Committee (alphabetical order)

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.

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