The Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) invites submissions for its research day “Connect the data” taking place on 18.11.2026, a convention for researchers and techies who model, create, use, reflect on the connections in and between humanities datasets. 

Across countless Humanities projects, growing amounts of data are being produced, curated, and made openly available. Yet many datasets often remain self-contained and rather isolated. Datasets from musicology sit beside datasets from literary studies, prosopography, dialect research or print culture, each unaware of its neighbours although they potentially describe the same people, places, and periods. 

Interlinking these datasets at the semantic level makes their fundamental interconnectedness explicit and computable. The result is a potentially dense web of relations across disciplines, regions, and epochs enabling new research possibilities and insights that no single dataset could offer on its own. 

The ACDH’s research day “Connect the Data”, is all about finding these connections and reflecting on their impact on research by exploring the possibilities and challenges of semantic interoperability across (Digital Humanities) projects and beyond. We welcome contributions from researchers who model, produce, curate, link or query data enriched with meaning, context, and structured relationships. As with any holistic investigation, the most productive connections are often the ones nobody expected. We therefore especially welcome contributions that seem improbable and invite critical reflection, stories of failure, limits and obstacles using Open Data, future of LOD and Semantic Technologies in the age of AI. 

Topics of interest: 

• Connecting heterogeneous datasets – Applying Linked Open Data and Semantic Web technologies to interlink distributed data sources, leveraging shared reference resources such as Wikidata, GND, and FactGrid to enable integrated querying across datasets. 
• Identifying (semantic) overlaps between datasets –  Discovering and reconciling shared entities across datasets, for example the same historical person described from multiple disciplinary angles, turning redundancy into richness. 
• Building semantic bridges – Mapping and aligning data models, ontologies, vocabularies, and named entities across projects, including approaches based on CIDOC CRM, RDF, OWL, and SKOS. 
• Distributed authority control – Collaboratively managing shared reference resources in a distributed environment: coordinating identifiers, reconciling authority files, and sustaining community-driven norm data. 
• Quality assurance and reliability – Ensuring the integrity and trustworthiness of interconnected data, especially when integrating potentially conflicting information from sources of varying provenance and quality. 
• Knowledge Graphs and AI – Enriching knowledge graphs with AI methods and incorporating structured semantic knowledge into AI-based workflows, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), MCP-based tool use, and entity-aware language models. 
• User interfaces beyond SPARQL endpoints – Designing rich, intuitive interfaces for exploring and visualising semantic data, including faceted search, graph browsers, and approaches such as Linked Open Usable Data (LOUD). 

Submission Details 

Abstract length: Maximum 250 words 

Submit to: Please send your abstract to ACDH-events(at)oeaw.ac.at

Submission deadline: 18 September 2026 

Notification of acceptance: 28 September 2026