From 10 to 14 May, Marieke van Erp was in Dubrovnik at the 23rd European Semantic Web Conferenc (ESWC 2026). The TRIFECTA project did not present any papers at the conference, but with Marieke as research track chair (together with Sebastian Rudolph of the Technische Universität Dresden) as well as PhD mentor, we thought we’d give a little peek behind the scenes. Note that this is a computer science conference, other disciplines might have slightly different formats and of course every conference is different.
The Lead-up
Conferences don’t happen overnight. In this case, the organisation committee (it takes a village!) led by this year’s general chair Maribel Acosta from the Technische Universität München was put together a year in advance. Via shared documents, email, a Slack workspace, Easychair and regular Zoom calls, we shaped the Calls for Contributions, invited colleagues to help us review the papers, discussed keynote speakers etc. etc. For the main tracks (research, resources, and in-use) abstracts were to be submitted by 27 November 2025 and full papers by 4 December 2025. We ask for abstracts a week beforehand so behind the scenes reviewers could already state conflicts of interest and indicate which papers they would like to review. Then in January, authors were sent the reviews to which they could respond in the rebuttal phase with the final decisions sent to authors in February. A month later already the camera-readies needed to be submitted so the proceedings could be prepared and made available before the conference.
ESWC 2026 also had 14 satellite workshops and 8 tutorials. The workshops can follow a different format, but often they have a paper selection process similar to the main conference. The workshops and tutorials took place on the two days before the main conference, starting on Sunday 10 May (yes, working on weekends, no worries, I compensated it the next week by taking Monday off).
The Conference Stats
A total of 344 submissions were submitted across the differerent main conference tracks. In our track, we had 124 submissions, each reviewed by 3 reviewers + 1 meta-reviewer and we accepted 28 papers (22.6% acceptance rate). Papers accepted to this conference undergo rigorous peer review and represent full scientific publications, comparable to journal articles in other fields.
This is not a super big conference, this year, there were 158 registrations for the full 5 days (workshops + main), 58 for only the main conference, and 52 for only the workshops. I like smaller events – there are still sub-communities, but it’s not so big that you are continuously tracking down people or you’re having to choose between 10 different parallel sessions (we had 3 parallel sessions during the main conference).
Showtime!
The formal programme of each day started with a keynote, we had one ‘from the community’, namely Maria-Esther Vidal, ‘one from a slightly adjacent community’ namely Isabelle Augenstein (as someone who started out as an NLP researcher, I was particularly excited about this) and one ‘from industry’, namely Atanos Kiryakov. Each of these were fabulous in their own right, and they should appear on videolectures.net shortly.
There actually was an additional, informal, start of the programme each day, and this was a ‘how to conference’ session led by ESWC 2026 Student Mentoring Chair Pieter Colpaert. He actually managed to get the keynotes and session chairs, as well as a whole bunch of early career researchers in a windowless room at 08:20 each day to go over the programme and explain paper and session formats. Given that even on the morning after the gala dinner (which included dancing, naturally) there still were attendees with good questions indicates that this was a well appreciated add-on that will hopefully be continued in future editions.
One of my favourite sessions of this conference is the minute madness: each poster presenter gets exactly 1 minute in the main hall to advertise their poster. The madness is in the speed, but also in people’s creativity: from bringing props, to presenting through a blues song, to local examples – it’s the most varied hour you will spend at the conference. Here, I also got to briefly present as TRIFECTA was included in the Project Networking Session, which was also included in the poster session.
The Aftermath
By Thursday night, I was exhausted. As co-organiser, there are always last minute things to sort out such as presenters who can’t make it after all, supporting the PhD track by mentoring two students there, chairing a session during the conference, putting together a best paper + presentation jury, signing certificates for awards, giving out awards (a really cool task!) etc. And then there are the regular conference activities such as catching up with colleagues old and new, and of course picking and choosing the right sessions to see papers on which we can build our research. But it was all worth it, so after a little breather, we’re now reading up and starting to think about our submissions to ESWC 2027!