[This post is partially based on Filippos Taprantzis Creative Technologies bachelor thesis and his amazing blog post]
As part of the VU-UTwente collaboration, VU Amsterdam now offers a bachelor program in Creative Technologies. This year, the first batch of students graduated with super nice and creative projects. I was happy to supervise one of these projects, by Filippos Taprantzis. Filippos developed Arcuno, a fully 3D-printable toolkit that can be used to arrange graph-like structures on a table. In particular, we focused on conceptual modeling (e.g. knowledge graphs, ontologies). One of the intentions of ArcUno is to enable a LEGO-building-like experience, which in turn can make the modeling task more intuitive and approachable.
Arcuno was accepted as a demo-paper at the 2026 SEMANTiCS conference in Ghent. In his blog post, Filippos details Arcuno, how it was presented at the conference, and why having 3-D printed components can actually save you when you forget to bring your actual demonstration material to the conference 🙂
From his blog:
“When Victor de Boer, my Graduation Project supervisor, initially proposed the idea of submitting the project to a conference, I could never have predicted that five months later, my friends Stijn, Nicky, Michela, and I would need to pull an all-nighter to remake the entire thing in under seven hours.
Before diving into the story, I would like to briefly describe what ArcUno, the project developed during my Creative Technology thesis, is and what problem it attempts to solve. “
read more at https://ftapr.com/rebuilding-arcuno-overnight
Arcuno github: https://github.com/robo-monk/ArcUno