First Workshop | Co-located with ESWC 2026 (23rd European Semantic Web Conference)
The maturing of Semantic Web technologies cannot be separated from the need for high-quality, reusable ontologies. However, traditional ontology engineering is a notoriously difficult, time-consuming, and expert-driven process. The advent of LLMs presents a paradigm shift, promising to accelerate and democratize this process, enabling "specialists from beyond computer science" to develop their own models.
While the potential is enormous, automated ontology creation from LLMs presents significant challenges that the Semantic Web and knowledge engineering communities have yet to systematically address. If the foundational ontologies generated by LLMs are of poor quality, incoherent, or formally incorrect, the downstream AI systems built upon them will inherit these critical flaws.
This workshop focuses on the emerging and rapidly evolving intersection of Large Language Models (LLMs), semantic technologies, and ontology engineering. It addresses the challenges and opportunities associated with leveraging LLMs for ontology creation, refinement, and validation. The workshop encompasses both theoretical and practical aspects of LLM-based ontology construction, including semi-automated/fully automated ontology generation pipelines, evaluation methodologies, and strategies for reducing hallucinations.
Motivation: This workshop is motivated by three key observations: (1) the growing practical deployment of LLMs in knowledge graph and ontology construction projects with minimal formal evaluation frameworks; (2) the lack of systematic comparison between LLM-based and traditional ontology engineering approaches; and (3) the absence of community consensus on appropriate evaluation methodologies and quality metrics specific to LLM-generated ontologies.
We welcome contributions on topics concerning the development and assessment of high-quality ontologies, both manually engineered and automatically generated using large language models (LLMs). The main topics of interest include:
Type: First Workshop
Length: Full Day (6-7 hours including breaks)
Mode: In-person (aligned with conference on-site infrastructure)
We plan the workshop to begin with an invited talk followed by presentations of contributed papers (with discussion), and eventually, by an interactive session of breakout groups working on and discussing ontology design issues and patterns. We will conclude with joint reporting and a community town hall.
The papers will be (single-blind) peer-reviewed. The workshop proceedings will be published by CEUR. We will also provide the option of not archiving the submissions on CEUR to the authors.
(Detailed submission links and deadlines to be updated)
The following is a placeholder schedule based on typical workshop structures. Specific papers and times will be announced closer to the event.