Sunday, 25 October 2009

Linked Data

Linked data is a way to link and share data on the web. The principles of linked data were outlined by Tim Berners Lee (the inventor of the Internet) in his Design Issues note. He stated that linked data had four main principles, these are:
  1. URI's should be used to identify things
  2. HTTP URI's should be used so these things can be referred to and looked up
  3. Useful information should be provided about the thing when it is dereferenced
  4. Links to other things should be included to improve the discovery on other related information on the web
The W3C has a Linking Open Data Community Project. This is to extend the Web with a data commons by allowing people to access various open datasets as RDF and setting RDF links between data items from different data sources. You can look at an example of a dataset here.

So I think the general idea of linked data is to allow people to find what they are looking for as easy as possible, by linking data together. So if they find something that is close to what they need but not it, the most relevant data that is linked to it may be what the person is looking for.

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