Chapter 1. Introducing Linked Data
This chapter covers
- An introduction to Linked Data
- The Linked Data principles
- Linked Data foundations
- Anatomy of a Linked Data application
What would you do if your boss told you to produce web pages for 1,500 television and radio programs each day, in multiple languages and character sets, with a staff of a handful of people? What if you needed to publish web content for every band and the songs they record, updated each day? How about web pages for each animal species and its habitat, inclusive of its endangerment status, when your organization doesn’t have that information?
The development team at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) faced all three challenges at once during a period of budget cuts. Very soon we’ll show you how they solved all three using Linked Data.
Linked Data makes the World Wide Web into a global database that we call the Web of Data. Developers can query Linked Data from multiple sources at once and combine it on the fly, something difficult or impossible to do with traditional data-management technologies. Imagine being able to gather any data you require in a single step! Linked Data can get you there. We know this may seem impossible, and it is with traditional techniques, but we’ll demonstrate how it works.