6th Summer Datathon on Linguistic Linked Open Data in Milan
September 5, 2026
A memorable week at the 1st GOBLIN Training School / SD-LLOD-26 in Milan
From 30 August to 4 September 2026, I attended the 1st GOBLIN Training School / 6th Summer Datathon on Linguistic Linked Open Data (SD-LLOD-26) at Villa Cagnola, Gazzada Schianno, Italy, near Milan.
It was an intensive and memorable week. We had seminars and hands-on sessions on SPARQL, VocBench, RML, metadata, LLM-based evaluation of Linguistic Linked Data, corpora annotation, and Knowledge Graph embeddings. On the final day, we also enjoyed an invited talk by Dr. Raquel Amaro, “Why lexical data still matter in the age of LLMs”, followed by final project presentations and awards.
Beyond the academic programme, Gazzada Schianno also gave me many unexpected memories. We visited Santa Caterina del Sasso, an ancient church and hermitage built into the cliff by Lago Maggiore. The boat trip across the lake was beautiful. In the evening, we also visited Villa Cagnola, the historic villa where we stayed. I learned that it was once an old noble estate, with collections including Chinese porcelain from the Yuan and Qing periods. Standing in the villa and looking across Lago di Varese, I could even see the snowy peaks of the Alps in the distance.
Our team worked on the mini-project “Automatic Classification of Literal Properties in Text-Rich Knowledge Graphs”, exploring how lightweight features and classifiers can help distinguish short terms, long descriptions, and numerical values in knowledge graphs.
A big thank you to my wonderful teammates: Huan Chen, Phonephet Vilaysack, Randy Saputra, Muhammad Azam Afridi, and Wenting Sun, and special thanks to our tutor Katerina Gkirtzou for the guidance and support.
Beyond the technical learning, what I will remember most is the friendship, teamwork, and shared moments with people from different places. This experience will stay with me for a long time.
Life is like this: some people arrive, some people leave, and we all continue our own journeys. It was short, intense, and unforgettable. I am grateful for the people I met, the work we did together, and the friendship we built. Take care, everyone — hope to meet again in the future.