by Bebo White, Bebo White is a Departmental Associate (Emeritus) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the U.S. national laboratory for high-energy physics and basic energy science at Stanford University.
The most convenient model of the World Wide Web is that of a network of interconnected documents and applications. Despite the success of the Web, this model suggests that data be constrained within pages or via simple database queries. Such a document-centric Web is convenient for human browsing, but difficult for machine processing. Alternatively, concepts of Linked Open Data (LOD) suggest that the Web can also be perceived as a globally distributed data space - the Web of Data. Such a Web would support structured, SQL-like queries that could offer interesting opportunities for the next generation of Web-based applications. Data from different providers may be aggregated easily; fragmentary information from multiple sources may be integrated to achieve a more complete view. LOD builds upon the Semantic Web vision that has been discussed for so many years. The talk will describe the basic principles of LOD and give powerful examples of how it is currently being used.
