Wouter van den Berg (TNO)

What drives our work is the idea that semantic interoperability is not fundamentally a technical problem, but a commons governance problem. As we’ve mentioned before: 'Systems not talking actually represent people not talking.' Keeping that in mind, we are asking the question: how can Generative AI help?

That was the subject I explored in my recent presentation, "Practical Experiences with BOMOS, Semantic Treehouse, and GenAI," at the ENDORSE 2025 conference in Brussels. For those who couldn't attend, I'm happy to share the full recording of the session.

Op 5 juni organiseerde TNO een Semantic Treehouse roadmapping sessie in Utrecht. Aan alle deelnemers onze hartelijke dank voor jullie aanwezigheid en waardevolle inbreng!

Terugblik​

Dit was inmiddels de derde keer dat we een dergelijke sessie organiseerden. In 2022 hielden we onze eerste gebruikersmiddag, en deze keer kwamen we weer samen bij YouMeet in Utrecht voor een middag vol inspiratie, uitwisseling en gezamenlijke roadmapping.

Het doel van deze sessie was opnieuw tweeledig. TNO wilde samen met standaardisatie-experts uit verschillende sectoren:

1. Kennis en ervaringen delen over trends en ontwikkelingen op het gebied van digitalisering en interoperabiliteit
2. Samen de toekomstige ontwikkelroadmap van Semantic Treehouse vormgeven en prioriteren

In a discussion about the possible role of AI to solve problems of interoperability, a colleague recently observed: "Semantic specifications are just expressions of human coordination." (Perhaps you can guess his stance on the potential of AI.) These words reminded me of a former client who I think once captured the same principle from a different angle by saying: "Systems not talking represents people not talking." These observations point at what to me is the core of standardization work: that the real challenge with interoperability is the human coordination it requires. Sometimes our conversations about interoperability focus a little too much on the technology, while it is the coordination that make all these technical specifications valuable.

For many organizations in the Dutch standardization community, the BOMOS (Management and Development Model for Open Standards) provides the framework for this coordination. BOMOS guides the creation and maintenance of high-quality, open standards through structured processes covering strategy, tactics, operations, implementation support, and communication.

This post clarifies how Semantic Treehouse serves as a practical, digital environment equipped with features specifically designed to support these BOMOS activities. Our platform was born from the need to execute these very processes more effectively, and this connection remains core to our identity, even as we serve broader roles like being a Vocabulary Hub in European Data Spaces.

Semantic Treehouse is designed to maximize the reuse of common vocabularies (semantic standards) to ensure a shared understanding of the data. These vocabularies are assumed to be created through open standardization, meaning that they're created 'by the users, for the users'. Open standardization justifies what is essentially a top-down approach to interoperability: as soon as the standard is done, it is published in a central place and users are expected to comply by aligning their data to it.

However, there are various situations that would benefit from a more 'bottom-up' approach, i.e. where the information flow is reversed. Instead of Semantic Treehouse providing information on what vocabulary to use, users provide information on the usage of their data. This need arises in situation where, for example, there's only a loosely defined community where standards are not yet formed. Or when typical users don't have the resources or knowledge to work with semantic standards and make alignments. To overcome this hurdle, Semantic Treehouse has developed a new functionality that allows users to create an initial vocabulary based on their own sample data.

Thanks to our friends at IDSA, I had the opportunity to talk about semantic interoperability in data spaces. Here's the official description of the event:

Op 3 november organiseerde TNO een Semantic Treehouse gebruikersmiddag in Utrecht. Aan alle deelnemers onze hartelijke dank voor jullie aanwezigheid en waardevolle inbreng!

Terugblik​

Het doel van deze middag was tweeledig. TNO wilde samen met klanten en collega standaardisatie-experts:

1. Kennis en ervaringen delen over het huidige en gewenste gebruik van Semantic Treehouse in verschillende branches
2. Samen de toekomstige ontwikkelroadmap van Semantic Treehouse vormgeven

Today we had the opportunity to present our applied research activities in the field of semantic interoperability in data spaces to the PLDN community. PLDN is the community of linked data experts in the Netherlands. In my presentation I positioned the importance of semantics, shared ontologies and a Vocabulary Hub in realizing semantic interopability in a data space.

The slides I used for my presentation can be downloaded here: Slides PLDN presentation

More about the PLDN event: event page

Position paper​

To read more about the topic of semantic interoperability in data space, please take a look at our position paper The Vocabulary Hub to configure data space connectors

The Vocabulary Hub to configure data space connectors​

Introduction​

Interoperability within a data space requires participants to be able to understand each other. But how do you get data space participants to use a common language? According to the IDS Reference Architecture Model (IDS-RAM), the main responsibility for this common language lies with an intermediary role called a vocabulary provider. This party manages and offers vocabularies (ontologies, reference data models, schemata, etc.) that can be used to annotate and describe datasets and data services. The vocabularies can be stored in a vocabulary hub: a service that stores the vocabularies and enables collaborative governance of the vocabularies.

The IDS-RAM specifies little about how vocabularies, vocabulary providers and vocabulary hubs enable semantic interoperability. The hypothesis that we address in this position paper is that a vocabulary hub should go a step further than publishing and managing vocabularies, and include features that improve ease of vocabulary use. We propose a wizard-like approach for data space connector configuration, where data consumers and data providers are guided through a sequence of steps to generate the specifications of their data space connectors, based on the shared vocabularies in the vocabulary hub. We illustrate this with our own implementation of a vocabulary hub, called Semantic Treehouse.