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The Web of Data
Tom Heath
Senior Research ScientistTalis Education Ltd
July 2012, SSSW2012, Cercedilla, Spain
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This talk is about the basics!
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Overview
• Why a Web of Data is not just about data on the Web
• Building blocks of a Web of Data (i.e. Linked Data fundamentals)
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Data on the Web
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Data on the Web
• Takes many different forms
• Falls on a continuum of accessibility/usability, structure, meaning and connectedness...
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Data on the Web
PDF → HTML → Microformats → CSV/XML → Microdata →RDF
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Schema.org
• The Semantic Web has gone mainstream!
• But they're trying to create one ontology for everything!
• Is it linked to anything else?
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Issues, PDF through Microdata
• Structure, parseability– How do we validate what we're extracting?– Is there an underlying data model?
• How do we know what the data means?
• How do you relate parts of the data together?
• How do consumers discover related data?
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Data on the Web != A Web of Data
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If there are no links, it's not a Web!
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The Web of Data
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What is the Web of Data?
• A boundless graph of interconnected data available online...
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What is a Graph?
Tom
Enrico
Talis Education
Spain
SSSW2012
Cercedilla
Italy
Madrid
2012-07-08
employedBy
studentOf
tutorAt
startedOn
bornIn
locatedIn
England
near
capitalOf
locatedIn
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One Graph, Many Documents
Tom
Enrico
Talis Education
Spain
SSSW2012
Cercedilla
Italy
Madrid
2012-07-08
employedBy
studentOf
tutorAt
startedOn
bornIn
locatedIn
England
near
capitalOf
lost Euro2012Final
locatedIn
won
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SubjectObject
Predicate
The RDF Data Model: Triples
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TomTalis
employedBy
The RDF Data Model: Triples
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Why I RDF
• Clear underlying data model
• Linkability baked into the data model
• Ways to express what the data means
• Many different ways to write it (for different use cases)
• Very easily parsed (in some cases)
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RDF Serialisation Formats
• RDFa
• RDF/XML
• N-Triples
• Turtle
• RDF/JSON
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Identifying Things in the Graph
• Use URIs
• But not any old URIs
• HTTP URIs– (almost completely) distributed ownership– anyone (with a credit card) can create/own them– can identify anything– lookup mechanism is baked in
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http://tomheath.com/id/mehttp://www.talis.com/id/company
http://example.org/employedBy
HTTP URIs for Things
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Retrieving Humans over the Web
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Linked Data Hands-On Session
• Goal:– Give practical experience of working with Linked Data from
the Web– Give exposure to different application architectures
• Scenario– Building a travel guide application
• Tools– Curl, LDSpider, Fuseki, Rapper, Squin
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Questions?
• Contact Info– [email protected]– http://tomheath.com/id/me– http://www.talis.com/– @tommyh (twitter)
• Slides– http://tomheath.com/slides/2012-07-cercedilla-
web-of-data.pdf
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