Linked data has been around for ages. However, there is opaqueness around what is linked data and what it does. To dispel the nebulosity surrounding linked data, Antero Duarte, Software Developer at Wallscope, takes us through a conceptual journey.
Linked data is a suite of tools, frameworks, and standards to make data shareable, reusable and machine-readable. A defining characteristic of linked data is the uniform resource identifier (URI), which represents all the entities. This means different people can use the same entity for different purposes, but as long as the URI is the same, it will mean the same thing.
While software companies are known to be leveraging linked data, yet its adoption is not as extensive as envisioned. However, things are changing. There is a growing realization that many of the obstacles to leveraging data can be tackled using linked data.
To begin with, linked data can be employed for creating an overarching knowledge graph or viewing data as a graph. In addition, it has a standard and an expressive query language (SPARQL). Furthermore, an average computer is powerful enough to cope with the processing requirements of routine graph operations.
Linked data comes with another accompanying standard OWL (Web Ontology Language). OWL is a set of languages/frameworks to define ontologies. Ontologies are essentially a formal way of defining entities in a graph and explaining how they relate to each other. When data is defined in this way, it offers access to inference, which allows the drawing of conclusions from the data without explicitly defining them.
Furthermore, linked data can be used just like any other type of data storage. There is a whole ecosystem of triplestores, libraries, and frameworks to work with and new ones are being created.
All these developments have made building linked data applications similar to developing any other application — design the data model, define the business rules and then build the application. The difference is that knowing the capability of the data means that there will be fewer things to dwell on about in the application.
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