This presentation provides an overview on Linked Data, its underlying principles and applications. It further discusses benefits and business models for enterprises; Held at the Tiroler IT Tag 2010

1. Linked Data
Overview and Potentials
Tiroler IT Tag
Innsbruck, 28.10.2010
Gefördert mit Mitteln des BMWFJ, des BMVIT und des Landes Salzburg
Dr. Tobias Bürger, Salzburg Research
tobias.buerger@salzburgresearch.at

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Motivation: The Digital Data Dilemma
 247 billion emails sent per day
 47 million added websites
 126 million blogs
 4 billion photos hosted by Flickr
 2.5 billion photos uploaded to
Facebook per month
 1 billion videos served by
YouTube per day
 Google operates over 1 mil.
servers worldwide
 65 million tweets per day
Core question: How to seperate the signal from the noise on
the Web / in an enterprise?
(Figures from 2009)
Figure: IDC

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Motivation: The Integration Dilemma
 Very large amounts of data -> problem of scale
 Different data types and schemas -> problem of
data heterogeneity
 Different information systems -> problem of
system heterogeneity
Core question: How to integrate data/systems and benefit from
integrated information sources?

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The Solution?
 Linked Data: Integrate data on the Web (and in
enterprises)

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Evolution of the Web
Hypertext
Hypermedia
Web
Web of Data
Social Web
(Web 2.0)
Semantic Web
Picture from [1]
?
Picture from [2]
“As We May Think”
-> Connecting documents
-> Connecting people
-> Connecting data & knowledge

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Evolution: From a Web of Documents to a
Web of Data
 Web of Documents  Web of Data
“Documents”
Hyperlinks
“Things”
Typed Links
Fundamental principles:
Names(URIs), Documents(Resources)
described using HTML/XML,
Interactions (http), Hyperlinks
Fundamental differences:
Structure of data of pages explicit
URIs for things
Typed links

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Vision of the Web of Data
 Many common things are represented in multiple data sets
 Linking identifiers links these data sets
Figure: Chris Bizer

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Linked Data Principles
1. Use URIs as names for things.
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those
names.
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful
information.
4. Include links to other URIs to allow discovery of related
things.

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Foundational Principle: Machine
Understandable Data
„tbuerger.jpg is a picture and depicts a person called Tobias Bürger
who is affilitated with a company called Salzburg Research which is
located in Salzburg which is a city in Austria.“

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Foundational Principle: Linking in a Giant
Global Graph
DBpedia
IMDb
DBpedia: related to
Works
list
DBpedia: Works
Geonames
Flickr
DNB
…

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The Enabling Technologies: URIs
 Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) identify things
 Use dereferencable HTTP URIs in the Web of Data

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The Enabling Technologies: RDF
 A data model for representing metadata on the Web
 Everything is a resource (e.g. a person, document, company)
 Several statements (triples) form a graph

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The Enabling Technologies: RDF
 Links are an intrinsic feature of RDF

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Benefits of Using RDF in Linked Data
 Clients can look up every URI in an RDF graph over the Web to
retrieve additional information
 Information from different sources merges naturally.
 Information expressed using different schemas can be captured in
one model.
 Any kind of structured/unstructured data can be modeled.

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The Enabling Technologies: RDFS
 A language for describing vocabularies in a machine
understandable way

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The Enabling Technologies: OWL
 A more expressive language for expressing vocabularies and/or
ontologies in a machine understandable way

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The Enabling Technologies: SKOS
 A language for defining controlled vocabularies.

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The Enabling Technologies: SPARQL
 A query language and protocol for accessing
RDF data on the Web
select distinct ?x
where {?x skos:subject
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:1980s_horror_films>}
LIMIT 10

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Linking Open Data Project
 What? Community project with W3C support
 Follows the Linked Data principles to publish open data sets
“The goal of the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project is to extend the
Web with a data commons by publishing various open data sets as RDF on the Web
and by setting RDF links between data items from different data sources. “
 Basic idea:
 take existing (open) data sets and make them available on the Web in RDF.
 Once published in RDF, interlink them with other data sets.

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LOD Cloud May 2007
Clouds: linkeddata.org

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LOD Cloud September 2008

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LOD Cloud March 2009

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LOD Cloud July 2009

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LOD Cloud September 2010

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Linked Data: Why should you care?
Figure: Tim Berners Lee

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Linked Data: Why should you care?
Figure: Tim Berners Lee

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Why should I publish my data based on the
Linked Data principles?
Elimination of data silos
Ease of discovery
Ease of consumption
Ease of integration
Reduced redundancy
Increased reusability
Ease of (schema) updates
…

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Benefits for Enterprises
Benefits arise from:
(1) Publishing Linked Data
(2) Consuming Linked Data
(3) Adopting Linked Data
Linked Data as a means to reach the „holy grail of enterprise information
systems“: complete, integrated access to all data.
Figure: http://bit.ly/21LmMA

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Benefits for Enterprises (2)
 Publishing Linked Data
 Structured analysis before publication stage => increased data quality
 Increased visibility of own data => increased (external) reusability
 Easier than creating and maintaing Web APIs => reduced costs
 Entity-driven publishing is strongly web-optimized => improved search engine rankings
 Consuming Linked Data
 Added value for proprietary data
 Easy integration of external data
 Mashup of internal and externally maintained data
 Adopting Linked Data
 Ease of data integration
 Ease of data consolidation (strong identifiers, clean modelling and linking rather than
replicating data)
 Structured queries over heterogeneous data sources
 Unified infrastructure for managing both internal/external data

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Business Models for Linked Data
Figure: Scott Brinker,
chiefmartec.com

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Linked Data Applications

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Positive effects of Using RDF and
Linked Data in Search
 SearchMonkey: An open platform for using structured
data to build more useful and relevant search results
Before After

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Linked Data at the BBC
 i.e. BBC Programmes,
BBC Music, BBC WildLifeFinder
 Linked Data driven publishing
of information at the BBC,
consolidating and inter-
linking several internal and
external datasets
 „One page for every
programme/artist
/species/etc.“

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Linked Data at the BBC (2)
Demo BBC MusicDemo BBC ProgrammesDemo BBC WildLife Finder

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Linked Data at the BBC (3)

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Getting Started: How can I build my own
Linked Data application?
 Publication Tools: Pubby, Triplify, D2RQ, Virtuoso RDF Views, …
 Interlinking Tools: SILK, ODD-Linker, RDF-AI, Knofuss, …
 Linked Data browsers: Tabulator Browser (MIT, USA), Marbles (FU
Berlin, DE), OpenLink RDF Browser (OpenLink, UK), Zitgist RDF Browser
(Zitgist, USA), Disco Hyperdata Browser (FU Berlin, DE), Fenfire (DERI,
Ireland)
 Linked Data mashups: Revyu.com (KMI, UK), DBtune Slashfacet
(Queen Mary, UK), DBPedia Mobile (FU Berlin, DE), Semantic Web
Pipes (DERI, Ireland)
 Search engines: Falcons (IWS, China), Sindice (DERI, Ireland),
MicroSearch (Yahoo, Spain), Watson (Open University, UK), SWSE
(DERI, Ireland), Swoogle (UMBC, USA)
 See further C. Bizer, R. Cyganiak, and T. Heath “How to Publish Linked
Data on the Web”

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Information & Contact
 Information
 www.tobiasbuerger.com
 www.newmedialab.at
 www.salzburgresearch.at
 gov.opendata.at
 www.linkeddata.org
 Contact
 Dr. Tobias Bürger
T: +43.662.2288.415
tobias.buerger@salzburgresearch.at
Salzburg Research
Jakob Haringer Straße 5/III
A-5020 Salzburg
Austria/Österreich
Fax: +43.662.2288.222