We are pleased to announce that Leonid Libkin is going to be one of our keynotes!
Here some words about what he’s going to talk about at ESWC 2025:
Title “Languages for property graphs: progress overview and future directions”
Abstract: Labeled property graphs are one of the two main models of graph data, together with RDF. In the past decade and a half they have seen an enormous progress in terms of product development, investment, and academic research. Most recently this culminated in two new international standards produced by the SQL Standard committee: SQL/PGQ specifies querying property graphs in SQL, and GQL is a standalone graph query language. In this talk I will give an overview of what has been achieved, and also present recent research results from the academic world. It has so far mainly followed developments in industry, deciphering standards and producing their abstractions; but now, equipped with those abstractions, we have been able to analyse new languages and find their deficiencies. I shall present some of them, and outline a roadmap of what can be done to rectify them and enhance those standards. I shall also make connections with the closely related RDF world and discuss how the two can be brought closer together.
Bio: Leonid Libkin is a professor of computer science at the University of Edinburgh and query language researcher at RelationalAI; he is also holding part-time industrial chair position at Université Paris-Cité. He was previously scientific advisor to Neo4j, professor at the University of Toronto, at École Normale Supérieure, and member of research staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. His main research interests are in the areas of data management and logic in computer science. He has written five books and over 250 technical papers. His awards include a Marie Curie Chair Award, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, eight Best Paper Awards, and a test of time award. He has chaired program committees of major database and logic conferences (PODS, LICS, ICDT), and served as chair of the Federated Logic Conference and general chair of PODS. He is an ACM fellow, a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a member of Academia Europaea.