Foreword

Linked Data: Structured data on the Web the book is just what Linked Data the technology has needed. It is a friendly introduction to the use and publication of structured data on the World Wide Web.

Linked Data was part of my initial vision for the Web and is an important part of the Web’s future. The Web took off as a web of hyperlinked documents which were exciting to read, but which could not effectively be used as data.

And, yes, in fact, much of the Web is data-driven, and the data has been hidden on files inside the server. In slides from my wrap-up talk at the very first WWW conference in 1994, I pointed out that while documents talk about people and things, such as a title deed saying who owns a house, the system was not capturing the data—the actual ownership fact—in a way that could be processed. As the Web evolved, and became more driven by data, there has been frustration that changing, hidden data is not exposed to the reader. Linked Data standards allow you to publish data in a way that can be read by people and processed by machines so that previously hidden flows of data become evident.

Linked Data may not be as exciting as a hypertext Web to read, but it is more exciting in terms of making everything work more effectively, from business to scientific research. Machines can read, follow, and combine Linked Data much more effectively than they can perform those actions using other forms of data currently on the Web.