By empowering people to take control of their own data, we create a sustainable ecosystem of unprecedented innovation. The future belongs not to data harvesters, but to smart reusers.

Ruben Verborgh

I’m a Professor of Decentralized Web Technology at IDLab of Ghent University – imec and a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin School within the University of Oxford.
I’m the Head of Data Interoperability at Inrupt and an advisor to other companies. From this hybrid academic and industrial perspective, my professional mission is to support Solid in inspiring, transforming, and reshaping our data-driven society.

As a computer scientist, I investigate how decentralized knowledge graphs on the Web can lead us into the post-Big Data era, where companies realize that data harvesting as a business model is a dead end. The future consists of lots of small data that is linked. People will be in control of where they store their data and with whom they share it, independently of the services they use. I’m researching and implementing technologies that enable us to effect this socio-economic change on both a local and a global scale.

Blog

I’ve blogged about Linked Data, Web APIs, and JavaScript, but the bulk of my writings nowadays cover the present and future of the Solid ecosystem:

No more raw data

Trust envelopes enable responsible data reuse.

A data ecosystem fosters sustainable innovation

By equipping people with personal data vaults, we can leverage more data for better services.

Paradigm shifts for the decentralized Web

As separate markets for data and apps emerge, Web development needs to adopt a new shape.

Reflections of knowledge

Designing Web APIs for sustainable interactions within decentralized knowledge graph ecosystems.

Let’s talk about pods

A new solution space for apps emerges if we adopt a different model for thinking about Solid.

Publications

Discover my ongoing research through my recent publications:

• A Rule-Based Software Agent on Top of Personal Data Stores poster

  Wout Slabbinck, Ruben Dedecker, and Ruben Verborgh 2023

  Proceedings of the 22^nd International Semantic Web Conference: Posters, Demos, and Industry Tracks details BibTeX

• Link Traversal Query Processing over Decentralized Environments with Structural Assumptions conference

  Ruben Taelman and Ruben Verborgh 2023

  Proceedings of the 22^nd International Semantic Web Conference details full text BibTeX

• In-Memory Indexing of Quoted RDF Triples workshop

  Ruben Taelman and Ruben Verborgh 2023

  Proceedings of the 7^th Workshop on Storing, Querying and Benchmarking Knowledge Graphs details full text BibTeX

• How Does the Link Queue Evolve during Traversal-Based Query Processing? workshop

  Ruben Eschauzier, Ruben Taelman, and Ruben Verborgh 2023

  Proceedings of the 7^th Workshop on Storing, Querying and Benchmarking Knowledge Graphs details full text BibTeX

• Re-Decentralizing the Web, For Good This Time chapter

  Ruben Verborgh 2023

  Linking the World’s Information: Essays on Tim Berners-Lee’s Invention of the World Wide Web details full text BibTeX

See all my publications…