KNowledge On Web Scale

The Knowledge on Web scale (KNoWS) office of IDLab - Ghent University.

Work with us

Vacancies

Become our colleague and have an impact on the future of the Web! Find out more about available career opportunities and how to apply.

Project

Are you interested in working on a project together with us? Find out more about the possibilities and how to get in touch.

PhD

Are you passionate about the same topics as we are and want to do your PhD with us? Find out more about the possibilities and how to apply.

Research stay

Are you a PhD student who wants to do a research stay with us? Find out more about the possibilities and how to apply.

Master thesis

Are you a student and want to do your master thesis with us? Find out more about the possibilities and how to apply.

Sponsorships

Are you looking for a sponsorship for a course or conference? Do you identify as a women or Black person? Find out more about our sponsorships and how to apply.

BoB

Building Information Modelling (BIM) allows making elaborate, information-rich models of building designs. However, there is no easy way yet to couple these models to what is actually happening on-site, during a construction. The BoB project aims to create a 2-way link between BIM models and the actual building, improving building efficiency and avoiding costly errors.

ERA-KG

Bilateral collaboration with the European Agency for Railways (ERA) to create and evolve a semantic interoperability layer that integrates the different base registries maintained by the agency.

FRACTION

Today, centralized stores govern the storage and processing of Big Data. Due to regulation (e.g. GDPR) and increasing awareness of people about data sensitivity, a paradigm shift towards decentralization is imminent. This allows people to control their own personal data, by guarding all public and private data they or others create about them in a vault, and selectively granting access to people and organizations of their choice. Future uses of Big Data are thus bound to shift from a small number of large datasets to a large number of small datasets. As such, the fundamental assumptions on which the current approaches are built to deal with the characteristics of Big Data (Volume, Variety & Velocity) are no longer valid, i.e. volume cannot be tackled by centralising data in a single location, high velocity data streams cannot be sent to a centralised data center and the variety problem cannot be resolved by imposing a single data format. FRACTION supports the shift to a decentralized approach by leveraging Semantic Web technologies. It will investigate 1. algorithms that autonomously distribute the analytics across the decentralized network, while hiding its complexity to the user, 2. decentralized and user-friendly data access control policies, and 3. methods to exploit the heterogeneity of the decentralized network to improve scalability and performance of the analytics.

Hybrid AI for Buildings

To convert office buildings in truly sustainable (to meet climate goals), comfortable & healthy (to improve employee wellbeing and related productivity) and flexible spaces (supporting the balance between telecommuting and on site working) extra (smart) services are needed to help building & facility managers to decide on building upgrade investments, optimally allocate office spaces and optimally control HVAC systems. Such services require access to a broad range of data sources (HVAC data, user feedback, BIM models, etc.) via easy accessible interfaces, but current deployment requires a lot of (manual) work as data is often distributed over many systems, using different protocols and data models. There is a clear need to extend the interoperability capabilities between stakeholders and service providers involved in the building lifecycle, to enable a rapid scaling to many buildings. Hybrid AI for buildings is an imec.AAA project focusing on designing tools and algorithms to easily design building optimization services by leveraging a semantic model for interoperability and easily supporting the design of novel AI services based on this semantically enriched data.

MareGraph

MareGraph will build a data architecture for cost-efficient, flexible and sustainable data sharing for a Marine Knowledge Graph. In this project we collaborate with the Flemish Marine Institute (VLIZ), Digital Flanders and the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

Mellon Scholarly Communication

At the basis of this project is a vision of a researcher-centric, institution-enabled scholarly communication system, aligned with the Decentralized Web concepts and technologies, in which researchers use a personal domain and associated storage space as their long-term scholarly hub, and in which the core functions of scholarly communication are fulfilled in a decoupled manner.

Onto-DESIDE

The Onto-DESIDE (Ontology-based Decentralized Sharing of Industry Data in the European Circular Economy) will address the main challenges facing industry that prevent the efficient sharing of data and making it understandable and usable by humans and machines. The project targets four core project outcomes: - A shared vocabulary in the form of network of ontologies. - An open circularity platform, i.e. a secure and privacy-preserving decentralised data sharing platform. - Methods to find, analyse and assess the new circular value chain configurations. - Validation – demonstrating and quantifying the potential for increased retainment of value.

RE-ENNOVATE

RE-ENNOVATE is an ambitious 3-year project to make home renovation smarter, cheaper, faster and better and re-innovate the process of energetic renovation. As the need for more energy efficient homes is only amplified by the current energy crisis, new tools are necessary for homer owners and professionals to understand which renovation measures work for them. With novel data-driven methods, RE-ENNOVATE will make the benefits and cost of renovations more transparent to individuals, propose personalized renovation packages, and increase automation, while continuously improving all steps by a closed feedback loop. The research consortium includes WTCB, imec, Ghent University, Adaptive, Mosard, Scone, Leuven2030 and Vandereyt. The project runs in cooperation with Flux50 and VLAIO.

SolidLab

To reinforce the trust of its citizens and help companies compete against internet giants, Flanders is leading the race to set a new standard in data protection. A EUR 7 million government investment is providing a major boost for the practical implementations of a technology called Solid. Three of Flanders’ leading universities are joining forces in SolidLab Vlaanderen.

Sytadel

Sytadel will provide technical data spaces architecture and design principles for actors who want to participate in the logistics data spaces in the future, together with open-source components and/or open software implementation guidelines.

See all projects