Last week the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2026) took place in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 10 to 14 May. This year I had the pleasure of chairing the Industry Track together with Lars Heling (SAP).
The Industry Track is where research meets practice. It is the place to share real experiences with knowledge graphs and Semantic Web technologies in production: what works, where the value lies, and also what did not work as planned. Honest lessons learned are just as useful to the community as success stories.
This year’s industry papers
Five papers were accepted, covering a nice range of real-world applications:
- Multi-Level Data Validation for Knowledge Graph Construction Pipelines
- City Orchestra: An Operational Knowledge Graph for Causal Impact Modeling and Rapid Urban Scenario Analysis
- DBpedia-Enriched Company Representation for B2B Lead Recommendation
- A Knowledge Graph–Driven Enterprise Internal Knowledge Hub for Consulting Activities
- MARS: an ontology for integrating architectural and maintainability requirements during system design
Together they show how broadly knowledge graphs are being put to work today: from data quality in knowledge graph construction pipelines, to causal “what-if” analysis for cities, to enterprise knowledge management and systems engineering. You can find the full list with all authors on the ESWC 2026 website.
Thank you
A big thank you to all authors who submitted their work, to the members of the programme committee for their careful reviews, to my co-chair Lars Heling, and to General Chair Maribel Acosta and the whole organising team for making ESWC 2026 happen. It was a great experience, and I’m already looking forward to seeing how these ideas develop in practice.