Earlier this month, the GLACIATION Project was presented at the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2025) held in Portorož, Slovenia, from June 1–5. The event brought together leading researchers and practitioners in the fields of semantic technologies, decentralised data infrastructure, and digital governance.

Aidan O'Mahony, Scientific Coordinator of GLACIATION (Dell Technologies / University College Cork), represented the project at a dedicated networking session focused on Horizon Europe-funded initiatives. The session provided a valuable opportunity to engage with fellow projects and discuss technical, ethical, and governance aspects of cross-border data collaboration.

In his presentation, Aidan O'Mahony shared concrete research outputs from the project, including recent work by Lakeside Labs, a key GLACIATION partner. Their publication explores the dynamics of pheromone trail formation in agent-based systems, drawing inspiration from ant colony behaviour. The findings are particularly relevant to edge computing and adaptive systems coordination:

“Stable pheromone trails emerge for low evaporation coefficient values (p = 9 × 10⁻⁵ or 9 × 10⁻³), while such trails vanish quickly at higher coefficients (p = 9 × 10⁻¹), eliminating coordination signals and resulting in random movement.”

These insights contribute to GLACIATION’s broader mission of designing systems that support privacy-preserving, federated data infrastructures—where efficiency, trust, and resilience must coexist.

The event also offered a chance to connect GLACIATION’s ongoing work with the challenges of semantic interoperability, policy enforcement, and technical governance in distributed environments, topics central to the project’s next phase.

We thank the organisers of ESWC 2025 for the opportunity to contribute and engage with the community, and we look forward to building on these exchanges as the project moves forward.

Learn more about GLACIATION: https://glaciation-project.eu/