SHACL for the Practitioner

with Veronika Heimsbakk and Larry Swanson

Date: November 24, 2025 - 11am London / 12pm Oslo Location: Online Registration Count: 53 on Dec 16, 2025 After my SHACL masterclass at the Knowledge Graph Conference in New York in 2022, I was asked by someone at the conference; “What is the name of your book?”. Well, I hadn’t written any book. Several friends in the community thought that putting my experiences and learnings from working with SHACL down into a book was a good idea. Here I am, writing my first ever book on the topic. What do I want with this book? I want to write a book with non-academic language, because we got enough of them in our field. A book that is easy to understand and follow. A book that gives a newcomer to SHACL a fair insight in SHACL and its applications. Therefore, is the largest part of the book centered around SHACL Stories. Examples of use and applications in production using SHACL to serve different user needs. Having worked with SHACL for some years myself has given me a SHACL Story or three, but I was depended on smart folks to contribute with their own stories. I feel honored that I’ve gotten a small flower bouquet of amazing guest authors on board. Why should I write about SHACL? I first learned about SHACL from my friend and former colleague Håvard Ottestad when we worked together for the Norwegian Digitalization Agency back in 2015/2016. Since then, I’ve been a part of developing and implementing two SHACL engines, thrown guest lectures at university level, had talks and masterclasses at various conferences on the topic. I have worked with SHACL in production on several client projects as a consultant, both public and private sector. Speaker Veronika Heimsbakk is a knowledge graph specialist with 10 years professional experience on semantic knowledge graph technologies. She’s been a developer, architect, advisor and team lead throughout her career as a consultant. She has worked with clients in both public and private sector across Europe. However, for the latter years, she’s heavily invested in clients in public sector. In 2024, she was rewarded as one of the Top 50 Women in Tech in Norway. Intro Larry Swanson is the Community Growth Manager at metaphacts, a platform for knowledge democratization and AI. He hosts the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast and co-organizes the Dataworthy Collective, a weekly meetup for professionals in semantics and data. Larry has organized various events, including the Knowledge Graph Conference and World Information Architecture Day. He is also a founding member of the Kinetic Council, which connects professionals across the data and content industries. External Links https://veronahe.wordpress.com/shacl-for-the-practitioner/ Session Categorization Session-Type: Technology - Standards - Use Cases Session-Level: Intermediate - Professional