Masterclasses
Three deep-dive sessions. One shared starting point: getting your data foundations ready for the agentic era.
Before Helsinki Data Week opens, we're running three standalone masterclasses. Each is a focused, three-hour, sleeves-rolled-up workshop led by an internationally recognized expert. They're designed for practitioners and leaders who don't just want to hear about the shift to agentic AI. You'll leave with something you can apply next week.
The three sessions tackle the same problem from three angles. AI agents are moving into operational data flows: reading data, making decisions, and taking action at a speed and scale that traditional review cycles were never built for. That raises three questions every data organization now has to answer:
Does the data mean what we think it means? Jessica Talisman's Just Enough Semantics takes on ontologies, knowledge graphs, and the semantic layer that lets agents navigate your data without guessing.
Can we trust the data the agents consume? Mark Freeman's Data Quality in an Agentic World covers end-to-end quality tracing and enforcement with data contracts.
Who is accountable when the agents act? Winfried Etzel's Think Across: Governance as One treats data, AI, and agent governance as a single discipline rather than as three separate disciplines.
Take the one closest to your heart/role and tell your colleagues about the other two! Together, they move you from raw data to trustworthy data to governed autonomy.
Good to know
Standalone events:
Each masterclass is a separate, hands-on workshop with limited capacity. Admission is 250€ per session and must be purchased separately from the ticket to Helsinki Data Week's Opening Event.Cancellation notice:
The organizers reserve the right to cancel a masterclass if a minimum number of tickets isn't reached. If that happens, you're guaranteed to get your money back.
Pick your session below and secure your spot!
Masterclass: Just Enough Semantics with Jessica Talisman
The numbers aren't enough - your AI needs to understand what the data means.
Kick off your Helsinki Data Week experience with an intensive, three-hour masterclass led by Jessica Talisman, a world-renowned authority on ontologies and information architecture.
Why Attend?
While the main conference focuses on the broader horizons of data & AI, this pre-event masterclass is a "sleeves-rolled-up" session designed for professionals who need to bridge the gap between raw data and real intelligence. The workshop will lead participants toward competency in ontology and knowledge graph modeling by creating an RDF SKOS thesaurus model, bolstered by AI agents and strictly constrained by standards. A central theme from the beginning of the workshop will be to discuss where AI is appropriate and where it is not.
You will learn how to
Understand the Foundations of Ontologies: Learn the theoretical foundations of ontologies, including the standards grounding this work.
Create Taxonomies and Utilize SKOS: Harvest terminology and definitions, and set up a SKOS project.
Visualize Your SKOS Model as a Graph: Validate your model in a visualization tool and create a "starter pack" for LLM-assisted ontology expansion.
Utilize AI Agents Reliably for Semantics Work: Learn how to use your standards-based ontology as a deterministic template to guide Large Language Models (LLMs) in extracting data into a set structure.
Meet Your Instructor
Jessica Talisman is a titan in the world of taxonomies and ontologies. With a career dedicated to the intersection of linguistics and technology, she helps the world’s leading organizations turn chaotic data into structured knowledge. Her sessions are known for being high-energy, high-insight, and deeply practical.
Who It's For
Designed for Data Architects, AI Engineers, Knowledge Managers, and senior Data Professionals.
Don’t leave your AI’s intelligence to chance. Learn why and how SEMANTICS is the word of the year!
Masterclass: Data Quality in an Agentic World with Mark Freeman
In a traditional analytical setup, poor data quality leads to a poor chart. In an agentic world, poor data quality leads to an autonomous system taking the wrong action in real time. To build "Production Grade" AI, we must rethink how we define, trace, and enforce data quality across the entire stack, from the transactional database to the application code.
Start your Helsinki Data Week with a bang and join Mark Freeman, co-author of the O’Reilly book Data Contracts, for a rigorous, three-hour masterclass on understanding and building the Data Quality required for the next generation of AI.
What You Will Learn
Redefining Quality: What does "quality" actually mean when the primary consumer of your data is an AI agent rather than a human analyst?
End-to-End Tracing: Learn how to trace data quality lineage from analytical warehouses back to the source transactional databases.
Quality in the Code: Explore how data quality manifests (and fails) within application code and how to catch errors before they propagate.
The Agentic Shift: Understand how AI agents change the stakes of data reliability and why traditional batch-processing checks are no longer enough.
Telemetry for AI: How to implement advanced telemetry to monitor the "health" of the data your agents are consuming in real-time.
Implementing Data Contracts: A practical guide to using data contracts to enforce interfaces, ensure schema stability, and guarantee reliability across the AI lifecycle.
Meet Your Instructor
Mark Freeman is a leading expert in data reliability and data engineering. As the co-author of the definitive O'Reilly book, Data Contracts: Developing Production Grade Pipelines at Scale, he has helped shape the industry standard for how modern organizations manage data interfaces. Mark is known for his ability to translate complex engineering challenges into scalable, real-world solutions.
Who It's For
Designed for Data Engineers, Analytics Engineers, Platform Engineers, and Data Reliability practitioners.
Stop fighting fires and start building contracts. Secure your spot today!
Masterclass: Think Across - Governance as One with Winfried Etzel
Data governance is the human-based system that ensures autonomous behavior remains aligned with organizational intent, direction, and accountability over time.
Get an early start to Helsinki Data Week and join renowned data governance expert Winfried Etzel for a high-impact masterclass on Data Governance!
AI agents are increasingly embedded in operational data flows. They read data that is not governed. They make decisions at speeds traditional review cycles cannot match. Board of Directors, regulators, and internal teams are asking questions about who decides, on what basis, and who is accountable. Many organizations cannot yet answer with confidence.
This three-hour session is for the leaders and practitioners responsible for closing that gap.
The session takes a specific position: data governance is a human-based, multidisciplinary system inside socio-technical organizations, and AI governance is a particular instance of it, not a separate discipline. The foundational questions remain the same: who decides, on what basis, under what constraints, and who is accountable. Speed, scale, and feedback are what change.
What You Will Explore
This workshop is built around the Four “Think Across” Axes:
Unified Governance Scopes: Data governance, AI governance, and agent governance as one discipline, not three. The questions stay the same, while speed and feedback are what change.
The Meaning Side: Shared meaning across domains, and the contracts and interfaces that carry it. How intent gets stated, agreed, and held over time.
The Technical Side: How that meaning gets encoded in schemas, types, pipelines, and model context, and where the encoding drifts from intent in production.
Practical Federation: Federation, decision rights, and lifecycle controls that turn governance into something the organization does, not something it has.
You will walk away with
An Activation Map for your organization
A Delegation-and-Decision-Rights Canvas
A 30-day commitment plan with named evidence to track immediate progress
Meet Your Instructor
Winfried Etzel is a leading voice in human-centric data governance. He specializes in helping complex organizations bridge the gap between technical capability and organizational accountability, ensuring that as systems become more autonomous, they remain aligned with human intent.
Who It's For
Ideal for Data Governors, AI Leads, Compliance Officers, and Senior Data Architects.
Close the accountability gap before it opens. Secure your spot today!