Linked Open Data

Abstract

In contracts to the isolated data silos of the conventional Web, the Semantic Web interconnects open data, so that all datasets contribute to a global data integration, connecting data from diverse domains, such as people, companies, books, scientific publications, films, music, reviews, television and radio programs, medicine, statistics, online communities, and scientific data. The union of the structured datasets forms the Linked Open Data Cloud, the decentralized core of the Semantic Web, where software agents can automatically find relationships between entities and make new discoveries. Linked Data browsers allow users to browse a data source, and by using special (typed) links, navigate along links into other related data sources. Linked Data search engines crawl the Web of Data by following links between data sources and provide expressive query capabilities over aggregated data. To support data processing for new types of applications, Linked Open Data (LOD) is used by search engines, governments, social media, publishing agencies, media portals, researchers, and individuals.