Local Type Checking for Linked Data Consumers

The Web of Linked Data is the cumulation of over a decade of work by the Web standards community in their effort to make data more Web-like. We provide an introduction to the Web of Linked Data from the perspective of a Web developer that would like to build an application using Linked Data. We identify a weakness in the development stack as being a lack of domain specific scripting languages for designing background processes that consume Linked Data. To address this weakness, we design a scripting language with a simple but appropriate type system. In our proposed architecture some data is consumed from sources outside of the control of the system and some data is held locally. Stronger type assumptions can be made about the local data than external data, hence our type system mixes static and dynamic typing. Throughout, we relate our work to the W3C recommendations that drive Linked Data, so our syntax is accessible to Web developers.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2013, arXiv:1308.026

Modelling the Semantic Web using a Type System

We present an approach for modeling the Semantic Web as a type system. By using a type system, we can use symbolic representation for representing linked data. Objects with only data properties and references to external resources are represented as terms in the type system. Triples are represented symbolically using type constructors as the predicates. In our type system, we allow users to add analytics that utilize machine learning or knowledge discovery to perform inductive reasoning over data. These analytics can be used by the inference engine when performing reasoning to answer a query. Furthermore, our type system defines a means to resolve semantic heterogeneity on-the-fly

Minimal type inference for Linked Data consumers

We provide an introduction to the Web of Linked Data from the perspective of a Web developer who would like to build an application using Linked Data. We identify a weakness in the development stack, namely a lack of domain specific scripting languages for designing background processes that consume Linked Data. To address this weakness, we design a scripting language with a simple but appropriate type system. In our proposed architecture, some data is consumed from sources outside of the control of the system and some data is held locally. Stronger type assumptions can be made about the local data than about external data, hence our type system mixes static and dynamic typing. We prove that our type system is algorithmic; and can therefore be used for minimal type inference. We also prove subject reduction and type safety results, which justify our claim that our language is statically type checked and does not throw basic runtime type errors. Throughout, we relate our work to the W3C recommendations that drive Linked Data, so that our syntax is accessible to Web developers.Accepted versio