The Emerging Web of Linked Data

The paper discusses the semantic Web and Linked Data. The classic World Wide Web is built upon the idea of setting hyperlinks between Web documents. These hyperlinks are the basis for navigating and crawling the Web.Technologically, the core idea of Linked Data is to use HTTP URLs not only to identify Web documents, but also to identify arbitrary real world entities.Data about these entities is represented using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Whenever a Web client resolves one of these URLs, the corresponding Web server provides an RDF/ XML or RDFa description of the identified entity. These descriptions can contain links to entities described by other data sources.The Web of Linked Data can be seen as an additional layer that is tightly interwoven with the classic document Web. The author mentions the application of Linked Data in media, publications, life sciences, geographic data, user-generated content, and cross-domain data sources. The paper concludes by stating that the Web has succeeded as a single global information space that has dramatically changed the way we use information, disrupted business models, and led to profound societal change.