Tom Heath

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.

Linked data: evoluving the web into a global data space

The World Wide Web has enabled the creation of a global information space comprising linked documents. As the Web becomes ever more enmeshed with our daily lives, there is a growing desire for direct access to raw data not currently available on the Web or bound up in hypertext documents. Linked Data provides a publishing paradigm in which not only documents, but also data, can be a first class citizen of the Web, thereby enabling the extension of the Web with a global data space based on open standards - the Web of Data. In this Synthesis lecture we provide readers with a detailed technical introduction to Linked Data. We begin by outlining the basic principles of Linked Data, including coverage of relevant aspects of Web architecture. The remainder of the text is based around two main themes - the publication and consumption of Linked Data. Drawing on a practical Linked Data scenario, we provide guidance and best practices on: architectural approaches to publishing Linked Data; choosing URIs and vocabularies to identify and describe resources; deciding what data to return in a description of a resource on the Web; methods and frameworks for automated linking of data sets; and testing and debugging approaches for Linked Data deployments. We give an overview of existing Linked Data applications and then examine the architectures that are used to consume Linked Data from the Web, alongside existing tools and frameworks that enable these. Readers can expect to gain a rich technical understanding of Linked Data fundamentals, as the basis for application development, research or further study.

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.

4th linked data on the web workshop (LDOW2011)

The Web has developed into a global information space consisting not just of linked documents, but also of Linked Data. In 2010, we have seen significant growth in the size of the Web of Data, as well as in the number of communities contributing to its creation. In addition to publishing and interlinking datasets, there is intensive work on developing Linked Data browsers, Linked Data crawlers, Web of Data search engines and other applications that consume Linked Data from the Web. The goal of the 4th Linked Data on the Web workshop (LDOW2011) is to provide a forum for exposing high quality research on Linked Data as well as to showcase innovative Linked Data applications. In addition, by bringing together researchers in this field, we expect the event to further shape the Linked Data research agenda.

Populating personal linked data caches using context models

The emergence of a Web of Data enables new forms of application that require expressive query access, for which mature, Web-scale information retrieval techniques may not be suited. Rather than attempting to deliver expressive query capabilities at Web-scale, this paper proposes the use of smaller, pre-populated data caches whose contents are personalized to the needs of an individual user. We present an approach to a priori population of such caches with Linked Data harvested from the Web, seeded by a simple context model for each user, which is progressively enriched by executing a series of enrichment rules over Linked Data from the Web. Such caches can act as personal data stores supporting a range of different applications. A comprehensive user evaluation demonstrates that our approach can accurately predict the relevance of attributes added to the context model and the execution probability of queries based on these attributes, thereby optimizing the cache population process.

LDOW2016: 9th Workshop on Linked Data on the Web

The ninth workshop on Linked Data (LDOW2016) on the Web is held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on April 12, 2016 and co-located with the 25rd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2016). The Web is developing from a medium for publishing textual documents into a medium for sharing structured data. This trend is fueled on the one hand by the adoption of the Linked Data principles by a growing number of data providers. On the other hand, large numbers of websites have started to semantically mark up the content of their HTML pages and thus also contribute to the wealth of structured data available on the Web. The 9th Workshop on Linked Data on the Web aims to stimulate discussion and further research into the challenges of publishing, consuming, and integrating structured data from the Web as well as mining knowledge from the global Web of Data.

LDOW 2013: The 8th Workshop on Linked Data on the Web

This paper presents a brief summary of the eight workshop on Linked Data on the Web. The LDOW 2013 workshop is held in conjunction with the World Wide Web conference 2013. The focus is on data publishing, integration and consumption using RDF and other semantic representation formalisms and technologies.