Why I’m Starting This Blog (And What Took So Long)
I’ve been meaning to start a blog for years. I’ve told myself countless times: “I should document this project,” “That would make a great blog post,” “Someone else probably has this problem too.” But like many researchers, I kept putting it off.
So why now? Honestly, because I’m tired of explaining the same concepts in different meetings, writing the same clarifications in different emails, and watching good ideas get lost because they only live in project reports.
What I’ll Write About
I work on trustworthy AI, semantic web technologies, and FAIR data infrastructure—applying them across healthcare, biodiversity, scholarly data, and cultural heritage. That’s the official description. In practice, it means:
- Wrestling with data that refuses to talk to other data
- Building systems that need to be both powerful and privacy-preserving
- Figuring out how to make researchers collaborate without drowning in complexity
- Learning (sometimes the hard way) what works and what doesn’t
I’ll write about these experiences. The successes and the failures. The elegant solutions and the hacky workarounds that somehow ended up in production.
Topics You’ll See Here
- Real project insights - What actually happens when you try to build data infrastructure across 17 institutions
- Trustworthy AI - Not just the theory, but the practical tradeoffs
- Semantic web & knowledge graphs - Why I still believe in them (despite everything)
- Research data management - The unsexy infrastructure that makes good science possible
- Cross-domain lessons - What healthcare can learn from biodiversity, and vice versa
A Fair Warning
I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers. Half of research is figuring out which questions to ask. If you’re looking for definitive guides and “10 steps to perfect data infrastructure,” this probably isn’t the blog for you.
But if you’re interested in the messy reality of building data systems for research, in what happens when theory meets practice, and in honest reflections on what works (and what spectacularly doesn’t), then welcome.
Let’s figure this out together.
Have thoughts? Questions? War stories of your own? Reach out at [email protected]