Linked Open Data: The Essentials

If you've been following the OpenEI blog for any length of time, you've certainly seen us refer to Linked Open Data. OpenEI is alive today largely thanks to LOD helping populate and manage many areas of our site from across the web.

As one small part of the huge movement in knowledge sharing, OpenEI is proud to be linked to the release of "Linked Open Data: The Essential", authored by Florian Bauer (REEEP) and Martin Kaltenbock (Semantic Web Company), with contributions from others, including Jon Weers, a lead programmer at OpenEI.

The book is a guide intended to help people understand what LOD is, the power it holds, how we should publish and consume LOD, and some examples of LOD in practice. The OpenEI example shows how our definition pages benefit from LOD coming from multiple places on the web to display and manage content.

"In the case of OpenEI Definitions, this is achieved using a semantic property called foaf:page. Because OpenEI, DBPedia, and reegle all refer to the same Wikipedia article as a page discussing the same topic, OpenEI is able to automatically generate the SPARQL necessary to fetch definitions from each of the other sites. In short, by semantically linking the OpenEI definition to a central concept (the Wikipedia page), the developers gain easy access to all other information linked to that same concept." (Linked Open Data: The Essentials, pg. 47)

The book is a great guide intended for an audience of decision makers who are trying to get up to speed quickly with the LOD concept, and who are trying to push their organization into the movement. Anyone with an interest in the concept of LOD should use this guide to familiarize themselves with the growing LOD movement.

To download, click here