The term Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions -the Web of Data. In this article we present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. We describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward.

This book gives an overview of the principles of Linked Data as well as the Web of Data that has emerged through the application of these principles. The book discusses patterns for publishing Linked Data, describes deployed Linked Data applications and examines their architecture.

The Web is increasingly understood as a global information space consisting not just of linked documents, but also of Linked Data. More than just a vision, the resulting Web of Data has been brought into being by the maturing of the Semantic Web technology stack, and by the publication of an increasing number of data sets according to the principles of Linked Data.The Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2008) workshop brings together researchers and practitioners working on all aspects of Linked Data. The workshop provides a forum to present the state of the art in the field and to discuss ongoing and future research challenges. In this workshop summary we will outline the technical context in which Linked Data is situated, describe developments in the past year through initiatives such as the Linking Open Data community project, and look ahead to the workshop itself.

The term “Linked Data” refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions— the Web of Data. In this article, the authors present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. They describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward.

Semantic Web conferences such as ESWC and ISWC offer prime opportunities to test and showcase semantic technologies. Conference metadata about people, papers and talks is diverse in nature and neither too small to be uninteresting or too big to be unmanageable. Many metadata-related challenges that may arise in the Semantic Web at large are also present here. Metadata must be generated from sources which are often unstructured and hard to process, and may originate from many different players, therefore suitable workflows must be established. Moreover, the generated metadata must use appropriate formats and vocabularies, and be served in a way that is consistent with the principles of linked data. This paper reports on the metadata efforts from ESWC and ISWC, identifies specific issues and barriers encountered during the projects, and discusses how these were approached. Recommendations are made as to how these may be addressed in the future, and we discuss how these solutions may generalize to metadata production for the Semantic Web at large.