Yann Le Franc

This episode of Inside EOSC features Yann Le Franc, CEO of eScience Data Factory, work package leader for LUMEN, and head of secretariat at EUDAT. Yann traces his journey from computational neuroscience, where he built models of the spinal cord and worked at the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility in Sweden, into the world of semantic web technologies and data management. He explains the foundational concepts of knowledge graphs and ontologies: how RDF triples represent subject, predicate, and object; how ontologies layer meaning onto otherwise structureless graphs; and why these technologies matter for both human navigation and machine reasoning. The conversation touches on the limits of triples when representing the messy nuance of human relationships, and on the work in FAIR Impact on aligning ontologies that describe the same concept differently across domains.We explore why knowledge graphs are valuable for AI, why grounding language models in structured, contextualised data produces measurably better answers, and why provenance and FAIR principles matter when ontologies are themselves models built by particular people for particular purposes. Yann reflects on the philosophical roots of ontology and the impossibility of a single universal model. The discussion turns to EUDAT's recent selection as a candidate node in the EOSC Federation, and the governance and sustainability challenges of providing transnational access to compute and storage across European borders.Yann also reflects on the unusual dual identity of scientist and entrepreneur, his decision to return to business school, and his growing focus on sustainable business models for European research infrastructures. The episode closes with a return to neuroscience: why our analogies for the brain are borrowed from computers, why LLMs are statistical machines rather than intelligent ones, and Yann's quiet conviction that science will save the world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.