The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is proud to be sponsoring a Blue Sky Ideas track at the upcoming international conference SEMANTiCS, taking place September 15-17, 2026 in Ghent, Belgium. We hope to award several winners with a travel grant to showcase their visions for the future of semantic web and knowledge graph research.
Call for Papers: SEMANTiCS 2026 Blue Sky Ideas Track
Event: SEMANTiCS 2026
Track: Blue Sky Ideas
Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 – Thursday, September 17, 2026
Location: Ghent, Belgium
Website: https://2026-eu.semantics.cc/
Aims and Scope
The Blue Sky Ideas Track at SEMANTiCS 2026 seeks visionary ideas addressing long-term challenges and opportunities in the semantic web and knowledge graph research field. We invite submissions of original papers that tackle open questions and unexplored ideas, narrowing in on one of the following foci:
- Solution: Present groundbreaking solution concepts or paradigms to long-term, well-known (conceptual or technical) challenges in the field.
- Problem:Clearly describe and specify a major challenge that, once solved, would have a significant impact on the research community, alike to the “millenium problems” in mathematics.
- Application: Describe a relevant application problem from industry to be solved with knowledge graphs and semantic technologies.
- Cross-disciplinary research: Identify emerging and promising cross-disciplinary research ideas; argue for promising paradigms to be learned and adapted from other research disciplines; discuss the potential impact of knowledge graphs on other research disciplines.
- Societal aspects: Present ideas and visions of contributing to solving societal challenges such as climate change, safeguarding democracy in the digital world, etc.
Some Topics of Interest Include (but are not limited to):
- Neurosymbolic AI
- Knowledge graphs and language models
- Human-AI interaction and knowledge graphs
- Semantics and distributed ledgers
- Knowledge graphs and robotics
- Hybrid intelligence
- Spatio-temporal and multi-modal knowledge graphs
- Graph foundation models
- Knowledge‑driven data quality & governance
- Trust‑weighted and uncertainty‑aware knowledge graphs
- Cognitive knowledge graphs
- On‑device / edge knowledge processing
- Self‑maintaining / self‑healing knowledge graphs
- Causal knowledge graphs
- The impact of AI agents and agentic systems on knowledge graphs
- Quantum computing and knowledge graphs
- Brain-knowledge graph interfaces
Review Criteria
Submissions will be assessed based on their novelty and quality of argumentation. Specific criteria include the level to which submitted papers:
- Contribute provocative and out of the box propositions
- Propose high-risk/high-gain ideas
- Differ from the mainstream research
- Address a long-term time horizon till the foreseen adoption by the research community
Submission Guidelines
Submissions must be no more than eight pages, excluding references. Please follow the same formatting guidelines as the SEMANTiCS research track.
Submit via: https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=semantics2026
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: May 30, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: June 30, 2026
Presentation Date: July 16, 2026
Presentation and Awards
The Program Committee will select three winners to present their work at the SEMANTiCS conference. The specific prizes will then be based on public voting amongst these three submissions. With generous support from CCC, the following prizes will be awarded as travel grants:
First Prize: $1,000
Second Prize: $750
Third Prize: $500
These three finalist papers will be published in the main conference proceedings (IOS Press). All other accepted submissions will be published in CEUR.
Blue Sky Track Chairs
Heiko Paulheim, University of Mannheim, DE
Marta Sabou, Vienna University Economics and Business (WU), AT
Contact email: semantics2026-bluesky@easychair.org
