Connected Data London 2024: Semantics, a Disco Ball Jacket and an Escalator Metaphor in Hindsight

This text is about my impressions from Connected Data London 2024. And about working towards a shared space of present and possible collaborative actions based on connected data and content.

Intro: Shiny Happy Data People

20 years after the article in which Sir Tim Berners Lee imagined a paper on which you can click with a pen (ref. World-Wide Web: The Information Universe ), here I am in the middle of the reception room of Connected Data London 2024 where a man is immersed in a graphy representation of the surroundings, being streamed on the screen, showing what the person explores with a pair of VR.

And that is only the external manifestation of the intertwingularity I ended up in.

I came to London in turbulent noosphere times. Connected Data London 2024 happened in between my reading of the book Alexandria: The City that Changed the World by Islam Issa, the collection of essays – Una Pietra Sopra (The Uses of Literature) and the merger of Ontotext (I wrote for Ontotext for 8 years, and then joined in-house to work on the internal Ontotext Knowledge Graph Project) and Semantic Web Company.

Both the mentioned books and the merger put me on a trivia. One of the roads meandering through combinatorics, where writing and text unfolded as acts of combination and play. The other was made of living currents  text, and culture, as processes in motion, endlessly becoming. And the third, was an act of convergence, a collision of sorts,  a dialogic act.

But then again the trivia was paved with a single kind of blocks – actionable connected data and text.

And this is what Connected Data London 2024 was about for me.

And no matter how many times I have thought about interconnectedness, the Semantic Web and our life and work at the intersection of content and data, it was a real pleasure to immerse in an atmosphere where all this was put in action and had become a real thing in the world.

Day 1: Taxonomies (again), Semiotics (sic!) and a knowledge graph for the community by the community (oh, yeah!)

I arrived later than expected having missed Andrea Goia’s talk and hastily entering Heather Hedden’s workshop on taxonomies. In 2023, at SEMANTiCS conference in Vienna, this was my first workshop to attend, having freshly started the work on the Ontotext Knowledge Graph (more about the adventure here: When Marketing Met Knowledge Graphs and LLMs: Ontotext’s Way ). But you never step in one and the same river twice. This time the workshop featured connections to the way taxonomies enhance knowledge graphs, and also a reference to ontologies and how the practical work can be combined. Yet another reminiscence of the fact that a little semantics goes a long way (link to my Ontotext reportage of the event)

Fortunately Andrea Goia, posted his talk and I could indulge in it post factum.

More than an enjoyable deck, adding semiotics to the Linked Data narrative and referencing to papers about the organizations that create knowledge and not only codify it, but also enact and embody it.

Speaking of embodiment, after the workshop I met Andrea Volpini – the man who talks with AI agents (and records monks’ meditation waves) and Beatrice Gamba from Wordlift.

We talked about Wordlift’s scaling path, marketing and of course, about 42.

The picture is of us, attending George’s presentation of the Connected Data London’s own knowledge graph (community-driven).

And then we ended up sitting together, listening to George Anadiotis presentation.That event was the last lecture at CDN 2024 first day, devoted to the results of building a knowledge graph out of Connected Data London’s speakers, events and recordings.

Vassil Momchev was also there, showing how GraphDB handled the challenge: GraphDB with schema.org

Bask in the details of the project: https://github.com/Connected-Data/cdkg-challenge

Day 2: Thank You For the Music, the Ontological Core and the Ikea Knowledge Graph (again)

Day 2 started with a blast. A blast by a disco jacket and the effervescent LJ Rich.

Listening to LJ Rich at Connected Data London 2024 was a very cool rhetorically dense reminder that while technology and data model many things, beauty lives outside the boundaries of what can be predicted or codified with a handful of tags.

She showed how AI can analyze the structure of a hit, by identifying patterns, progressions, and even emotional cues. But then again she reminded us that as AI learns to remix, recreate, and replicate, it just follows patterns.

And Bohemian Rhapsody is a total outlier in that sense.

LJ Rich also talked about the rigid (not expressive and detailed enough) categories that dominate music platforms today. Streaming platforms she argued tend to confine music into few fixed genres and tags which do not represent the richness of the music world.
It was a cool reminder that unlike AI music (I read that also in terms of AI generated text which is not a documentation but meant to move) what matters is still in the things and processes we can’t quite predict (patternize :)).

It was a revelation to hear the difference between a “hit” and a “hit” like Bohemian Rhapsody.

Now, in hindsight I realize that the talk was as m uch about data as it was about creativity, self expression and art. And that same applies – within a different paradigm – the creation of text – a memorable text, and a boilerplate text. The everlasting tension, probably a better framing would be – dance, between making french fries and living art.

Speaking of living art, I cannot miss to mention Katarina Kari’s note about us, as community, having data as our love language.

And speaking of boilerplate and quick fixes, my mind tried that quick fix – seeing Panos Alexopoulos while having chats in the corridors, and taking a picture, to remind me to watch the recording and alleviate my FOMO.

A small part of the talk is here, and it is an important topic, that will be relevant and enriched in time, so enjoy: Implementing Knowledge Graph Quality Assessment | Panos Alexopoulos | Connected Data London 2025. Also Panos Alexopoulos’s book “Semantic Modeling for Data – Avoiding Pitfalls and Breaking Dilemmas” is on my list. Yes, that FOMO one..

My day continued with Tony Seale’s Drowning in Data yet Thirsting for Knowledge, to methodically fill in the program with notes and take away his concept of the Ontological core.

It was a pleasure listening to Tony in person, as he was tackling the everlasting question about how to unlock real knowledge from the deluge of data we generate, in a world of distributed teams, cloud platforms, and domain ownership.

The secret?

Treating data as a product ref. DRPOD), coupled with an ontological core.

Please enjoy Jérémy Ravenel’s distillation of the talk with a cool photo on LinkedIn>

And don’t forget to loose yourself in Tony’s writing: (e.g. AI agents 🙂 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7384860796490682368/ )

IKEA Did It Again 🙂

Just before I left for my flight (which I caught, but then missed my connecting flight in Frankfurt, to spend a nigh there 🙂 I attended The IKEA Knowledge Graph as a Service: Scaling Enterprise-Wide Data Integration in a Global Retail Environment.

I have been following the narrative for some time (cf. Into the Heart of a UX-driven Knowledge Graph: IKEA’s RDF Way Forward) and it was a pleasure seeing how IKEA now shares the idea of scaling the knowledge graph across the enterprise.

Christelle Maignan Lead Ontologist, Inter IKEA Group, shared the story of how IKEA has been building and scaling its knowledge graph service.

She talked about her team initially being able to demonstrate tangible business impact, and show real improvements in online sales through knowledge graph-driven applications and then managing to spread the word about using the knowledge graph for other purposes. It was that success that gave them the momentum and began evolving the graph into a shared service that could support a wide range of teams and stakeholders across IKEA.

Christelle also shared about the non-technical challenges that come with this kind of transformation: dealing with data ownership, governance, and the need for thoughtful onboarding and training in environments where semantic technology isn’t necessarily front of mind.

What really stayed with me was her emphasis on communication and trust. She spoke about how much of their progress depends not just on the technology, but on building relationships, helping people see the value, and earning their confidence along the way. It was a great reminder about the human side of these knowldge graph adventures.

Instead of an Epilogue: Two Talks I Wish I Have [Had] Attended and an Escalator Metaphor in Hindsight

I met Dr Orit Gal in the reception room and had a quick nice chat with her. I wish I attended her talk Urban Serendipity – Manufacturing good luck using network science. There she talked about how technological changes have reduced everyday social interactions and how we can redesign physical and digital spaces to restore them.

You can see more about it in a LinkedIn share by Dr orit Gal. 

Also I had the pleasure to meet Jessica Talisman and chat with her and Larry Swanson. I missed her talk also, but watched a recording: Intentional Arrangement, From Digital Hellscape to Information Nirvana Humans.

There, Jessica in an immersive and enticingly intertextual way, showed how the field of Library and Information Science has long been responsible for designing systems that organize data and sustain both our physical and digital knowledge domains. And these days, in the age of artificial intelligence, many organizations are grappling with the consequences of neglecting these practices and that mindset.
And that leads to a digital hellscape.
The solution?

Back to librarianship.

The message was clear: if we aspire to build harmonious data ecosystems, which are optimized for both humans and machines, we must return to the principle that has guided information organization for millennia: intentional arrangement.

And now, the escalator. And an intentional arrangement of two pictures taken in different cities, with different people, within different contexts, yet sharing one concept – the elevation of our content and data practices.

Escalator 1: Elevating Content to the Power of Semantic Data

On Day 1, I met Cruce Sanders, Rahel Bailie and Lary Swanson for an italian dinner and a chat about content, semantics and the state of ContentOps and world 🙂

The escalator pic is a metaphor. In hindsight. Rahel Bailie and Cruce Saunders and other folks, are building the Kinetic council. The Kinetic Council is on a mission to unite and empower content, data, and semantics professionals through an industry-wide authoritative association.

And this building a bridge, a real one, made of people, between connected data and connected content.

Escalator 2: Elevating Data to the Power of Knowledge Management

And me, together with an awesome team – Helmut Nagy, William Sandri and Arkadiusz Chadzynski ( I will add our first team gathering picture on an escalator 🙂 here when I have permission from all) at Graphwise are also doing the same. Just arriving from a different perspective and need. We’re connecting knowledge management, ontologies, and data architecture in ways I’m excited to share, when the kairos is right.

And, yes, we have work to do.

And this is the call to action of this post, apart from – if you have a chance, make sure to visit Connected Data London 2025. (Excuse my Marketese)

In any case, see you soon in my LinkedIn Newsletter (Knowledge Graphs ❤️ Content) where I will talk about the beautiful Olfactory Knowledge Graph.

And looking forward to working with you for a Semantic Web vision that is growing increasingly powerful and important, flourishing among wider and wider circles of people, weaving the Web.