Chapter 3. Consuming Linked Data

The World Wide Web that most of us envision is technically a subset better defined as the Web of Documents (the Classic Web). Another facet of the WWW is the Web of Data. You should think of the Semantic Web as a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.

Just as web documents employ hyperlinks to connect to each other, linked datasets establish connections through the use of RDF links between data items in different datasets. Linked Data conforms to a set of principles for publishing structured data on the World Wide Web.

This chapter will facilitate your understanding of the Web of Data by demonstrating how you can be a consumer of its content. We’ll demonstrate how Linked Data is distributed and utilized. We’ll show how you can use tools to find embedded Linked Data. We’ll illustrate how you can develop programs that retrieve Linked Data from one source and use those results to retrieve additional data from a different source. We expect that you’ll gain a better understanding of the Web of Data and how various companies are utilizing Linked Data to better serve their customers.

3.1. Thinking like the Web

3.2. How to consume Linked Data

3.3. Tools for finding distributed Linked Data

3.4. Aggregating Linked Data

3.5. Crawling the Linked Data Web and aggregating data

3.6. Summary