by Angela Guess
Ken North recently wrote, “While ‘Big Data’ has been a hot button for venture capitalists and the trade press, there have been several years of progress in the ‘Biggest Data’ arena. The Semantic Web meme, with some prodding by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has morphed into the Linked Data meme. And the notion of building the world’s largest database has gained traction and continues to move forward.”
He goes on, “The basic premise is augmenting searches by making data, even raw data, accessible to the Internet browsing experience. Moving from a web of linked documents to a web of linked data provides a key building block for Web 3.0. A useful resource for data modelers and database geeks, Open Conceptual Data Models, describes the transition as moving from ‘a Web linked at the document-to-document level, to one linked at the entity-to-entity level.’”
North continues, “Two W3C specifications provide vital information to developers who want to publish and exploit Linked Data. The Resource Description Format (RDF) provides a data model for web information, representing it with a directed, labeled graph data format. The RDF format is triples: subject, predicate, object. SPARQL provides a query language and protocol for operations with RDF data sets. SPARQL can produce query results as RDF graphs or result sets. Because working with RDF and SPARQL is like working directly with SQL, sites that publish link data might choose to offer APIs. The proliferation of SQL was due in part to a proliferation of tools that wrapped SQL and provided a higher level of abstraction. Simple, easily understood APIs will likely do the same for RDF and SPARQL.”
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