Tim Berners-Lee

Linked Data - The Story So Far

The term “Linked Data” refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions— the Web of Data. In this article, the authors present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. They describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward.

World‐Wide Web: The Information Universe

The World‐Wide Web (W3) initiative is a practical project designed to bring a global information universe into existence using available technology. This article describes the aims, data model, and protocols needed to implement the “web” and compares them with various contemporary systems.

Information accountability

With access control and encryption no longer capable of protecting privacy, laws and systems are needed that hold people accountable for the misuse of personal information, whether public or secret.

A framework for web science

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Webs topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web

The Web must be studied as an entity in its own right to ensure it keeps flourishing and prevent unanticipated social effects.

Linked data on the web (LDOW2008)

The Web is increasingly understood as a global information space consisting not just of linked documents, but also of Linked Data. More than just a vision, the resulting Web of Data has been brought into being by the maturing of the Semantic Web technology stack, and by the publication of an increasing number of datasets according to the principles of Linked Data. The Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2008) workshop brings together researchers and practitioners working on all aspects of Linked Data. The workshop provides a forum to present the state of the art in the field and to discuss ongoing and future research challenges. In this workshop summary we will outline the technical context in which Linked Data is situated, describe developments in the past year through initiatives such as the Linking Open Data community project, and look ahead to the workshop itself.

Publishing on the semantic web.

The coming Internet revolution will profoundly affect scientific information.

WWW: past, present, and future

The World Wide Web is simply defined as the universe of global network-accessible information. It is an abstract space within which people can interact, and it is chiefly populated by interlinked pages of text, images, and animations, with occasional sounds, videos, and three-dimensional worlds. The Web marks the end of an era of frustrating and debilitating incompatibility between computer systems. It has created an explosion of accessibility, with many potential social and economical impacts. The Web was designed to be a space within which people could work on a project. This was a powerful concept, in that: people who build a hypertext document of their shared understanding can refer to it at all times; people who join a project team can have access to a history of the teams activities, decisions, and so on; the work of people who leave a team can be captured for future reference; and a teams operations, if placed on the Web, can be machine-analyzed in a way that could not be done otherwise. The Web was originally supposed to be a personal information system and a tool for groups of all sizes, from a team of two to the entire world. People have rapidly developed new features for the Web, because of its tremendous commercial potential. This has made the maintenance of globalWeb interoperability a continuous task. This has also created a number of areas into which research must continue.

Linked Open Government Data: Lessons from Data.gov.uk

A project to extract value from open government data contributes to the population of the linked data Web with high-value data of good provenance.

N3logic: A logical framework for the world wide web

The Semantic Web drives toward the use of the Web for interacting with logically interconnected data. Through knowledge models such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Semantic Web provides a unifying representation of richly structured data. Adding logic to the Web implies the use of rules to make inferences, choose courses of action, and answer questions. This logic must be powerful enough to describe complex properties of objects but not so powerful that agents can be tricked by being asked to consider a paradox. The Web has several characteristics that can lead to problems when existing logics are used, in particular, the inconsistencies that inevitably arise due to the openness of the Web, where anyone can assert anything. N3Logic is a logic that allows rules to be expressed in a Web environment. It extends RDF with syntax for nested graphs and quantified variables and with predicates for implication and accessing resources on the Web, and functions including cryptographic, string, math. The main goal of N3Logic is to be a minimal extension to the RDF data model such that the same language can be used for logic and data. In this paper, we describe N3Logic and illustrate through examples why it is an appropriate logic for the Web.