Preface on special session “data impact: Big, open, linked data innovations”

It is well known that in the contemporary times of knowledge, data plays a pivotal role in all facets of human activity and societal interest. Processing large amounts of data is increasingly considered as conditio sine qua non for policy making by governments and decision making by individuals or enterprises. Open data is published on the Web in many heterogeneous formats. New paradigms on data representation and applications development should not multiply the competing approaches for big data, but rather build on previous work and align the divergent approaches together through use of links and semantic relations. The benefits of the proposed approach based on linked data become apparent in tasks requiring combination of datasets from multiple sources. The absence of links and explicit semantics forms a barrier to automated processing, combining, and joining datasets of distinct origin. In context of such tasks, applying linked data and semantic web technologies offers greater data