A Typed Model for Linked Data

The term Linked Data is used to describe ubiquitous and emerging semi-structured data formats on the Web. URIs in Linked Data allow diverse data sources to link to each other, forming a Web of Data. A calculus which models concurrent queries and updates over Linked Data is presented. The calculus exhibits operations essential for declaring rich atomic actions. The operations recover emergent structure in the loosely structured Web of Data. The calculus is executable due to its operational semantics. A light type system ensures that URIs with a distinguished role are used consistently. The main theorem verifies that the light type system and operational semantics work at the same level of granularity, so are compatible. Examples show that a range of existing and emerging standards are captured. Data formats include RDF, named graphs and feeds. The primitives of the calculus model SPARQL Query and the Atom Publishing Protocol. The subtype system is based on RDFS, which improves interoperability. Examples focuss on the SPARQL Update proposal for which a fine grained operational semantics is developed. Further potential high level languages are outlined for exploiting Linked Data

Learning By Example: Designing and Developing Linked Data Application

According to constructivist theory of learning, new knowledge is acquired on the basis of what is already known by learners. Learning to build Linked Data applications challenges traditional web technologists to think differently at every stage of the design and development process, starting from data modeling all the way to presenting data on the Linked Data web. Thus to understand and adopt an emerging and transformative web technology such as Linked Data, it is useful for web technologists to learn it in the context of prevalent web tools and technologies. This paper presents a comparative and illustrative example of designing and developing Linked Data application using the traditional and familiar LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP) web technology stack

Linked Data in Libraries: A Case Study of Harvesting and Sharing Bibliographic Metadata with BIBFRAME

By way of a case study this paper illustrates and evaluates the Bibliographic Framework (or BIBFRAME) as means for harvesting and sharing bibliographic metadata over the Web for libraries. BIBFRAME is an emerging framework developed by the Library of Congress for bibliographic description based on Linked Data. Much like Semantic Web, the goal of Linked Data is to make Web “data aware” and transform the existing Web of documents into a Web of data. Linked Data leverages the existing Web infrastructure and allows linking and sharing of structured data for human and machine consumption. The BIBFRAME model attempts to contextualize the Linked Data technology for libraries. Library applications and systems contain high-quality structured metadata but this data is generally static in its presentation and seldom integrated with other internal metadata sources or linked to external Web resources. With BIBFRAME existing disparate library metadata sources such as catalogs and digital collections can be harvested and integrated over the Web. In addition, bibliographic data enriched with Linked Data could offer richer navigational control and access points for users. With Linked Data principles, metadata from libraries could also become harvestable by search engines, transforming dormant catalogs and digital collections into active knowledge repositories. Thus experimenting with Linked Data using existing bibliographic metadata holds the potential to empower libraries to harness the reach of commercial search engines to continuously discover, navigate, and obtain new domain specific knowledge resources on the basis of their verified metadata. The initial part of the paper introduces BIBFRAME and discusses Linked Data in the context of libraries. The final part of this paper outlines a step-by-step process for implementing BIBFRAME with existing library metadata

A lightweight web video model with content and context descriptions for integration with linked data

The rapid increase of video data on the Web has warranted an urgent need for effective representation, management and retrieval of web videos. Recently, many studies have been carried out for ontological representation of videos, either using domain dependent or generic schemas such as MPEG-7, MPEG-4, and COMM. In spite of their extensive coverage and sound theoretical grounding, they are yet to be widely used by users. Two main possible reasons are the complexities involved and a lack of tool support. We propose a lightweight video content model for content-context description and integration. The uniqueness of the model is that it tries to model the emerging social context to describe and interpret the video. Our approach is grounded on exploiting easily extractable evolving contextual metadata and on the availability of existing data on the Web. This enables representational homogeneity and a firm basis for information integration among semantically-enabled data sources. The model uses many existing schemas to describe various ontology classes and shows the scope of interlinking with the Linked Data cloud

A Conversation on the Semantic Web and Legal Information

A Pre-Conference Workshop delivered Saturday, May 24th, 2014 from 8:30am -12:00pm at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries annual meeting in Winnipeg, Manitoba.Have you been wondering "What's next" with technology; or perhaps what APIs, open government data, linked data or the semantic web will ever mean for law libraries? This workshop will give participants an overview of the emerging linked data and semantic web in the context of legal information aimed at an audience with little pre-existing understanding of the subject. We will start with a high level discussion of the theory behind data creation and manipulation, with demonstrations of public and closed sources for data such as APIs and open government datasets, linked data particularly, and the semantic web generally – what it is, how it has developed so far, examples of related legal projects, and some ideas about its implications for legal resources. This will be followed by a facilitated discussion of the anticipated impacts for legal research, publication, software development, and the practice of law. These emerging developments are important because they have the potential to create both opportunities and disruption in many areas of interest to CALL/ACBD members, including public service roles and those in related data fields like cataloguing and legal database development.Access Services and Resource Sharing Special Interest Group, Canadian Association of Law Librarie

Geo-L: Topological Link Discovery for Geospatial Linked Data Made Easy

Geospatial linked data are an emerging domain, with growing interest in research and the industry. There is an increasing number of publicly available geospatial linked data resources, which can also be interlinked and easily integrated with private and industrial linked data on the web. The present paper introduces Geo-L, a system for the discovery of RDF spatial links based on topological relations. Experiments show that the proposed system improves state-of-the-art spatial linking processes in terms of mapping time and accuracy, as well as concerning resources retrieval efficiency and robustness

Language resources and linked data: a practical perspective

Recently, experts and practitioners in language resources have started recognizing the benefits of the linked data (LD) paradigm for the representation and exploitation of linguistic data on the Web. The adoption of the LD principles is leading to an emerging ecosystem of multilingual open resources that conform to the Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud, in which datasets of linguistic data are interconnected and represented following common vocabularies, which facilitates linguistic information discovery, integration and access. In order to contribute to this initiative, this paper summarizes several key aspects of the representation of linguistic information as linked data from a practical perspective. The main goal of this document is to provide the basic ideas and tools for migrating language resources (lexicons, corpora, etc.) as LD on the Web and to develop some useful NLP tasks with them (e.g., word sense disambiguation). Such material was the basis of a tutorial imparted at the EKAW’14 conference, which is also reported in the paper

FindSampo Platform for Reporting and Studying Archaeological Finds Using Citizen Science

This paper introduces the FindSampo platform for reporting and studying archaeological finds on the Semantic Web. FindSampo brings together members of the public, scientists, cultural heritage managers, and archaeologists utilising citizen science mediated by Linked Open Data and emerging Web development technologies. Our focus is on reporting technical results on designing the user interface and its evaluation in a field test.Peer reviewe

Connecting medical educational resources to the Linked Data cloud: the mEducator RDF Schema, store and API

The existence of non-interoperable metadata schemas and limited use of shared vocabularies means that retrieving and processing educational resources across the Web represents a challenge. The emerging Linked Data paradigm has provided the tools and methods to share and expose metadata in a more unified and well interlinked manner, permitting both humans and machines to process Web data. The availability of vast amounts of RDF-based Linked Data is offering a worthwhile alternative to the isolated and heterogeneous data silos which previously dominated the Web. In the ECfunded project mEducator a standardised approach is proposed to describing and exposing medical educational resources. In this paper are described firstly the design considerations, and conceptual model upon which mEducator’s metadata scheme approach was based. Afterwards, follows the description of the serialization of the scheme in RDF/XML, and in turn follows an example showing how medical educational resources are exposed on the Web using an RDF endpoint, and discuss the potential advantages of this approach