The Web is increasingly understood as a global information space consisting not just of linked documents, but also of Linked Data. More than just a vision, the resulting Web of Data has been brought into being by the maturing of the Semantic Web technology stack, and by the publication of an increasing number of data sets according to the principles of Linked Data. The Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2008) workshop brings together researchers and practitioners working on all aspects of Linked Data. The workshop provides a forum to present the state of the art in the field and to discuss ongoing and future research challenges. In this workshop summary we will outline the technical context in which Linked Data is situated, describe developments in the past year through initiatives such as the Linking Open Data community project, and look ahead to the workshop itself.
1http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/
LinkingOpenData
SPARQL. Geonames in turn provides RDF descriptions of millions of geographical locations worldwide. DBpedia and Geo-names provide URIs (and RDF descriptions) for many of the things in the world to which we want to refer. As these URIs are reused within other data sets, DBpedia and Geonames develop into hubs to which an increasing number of other data sets are connected, thereby increasing the potential for network effects.
In addition to publishing and interlinking data sets, there is also ongoing work within the community project on Linked Data browsers, Linked Data crawlers, Web of Data search engines and other applications that consume Linked Data from the Web. Examples of Linked Data browsers6 are Tabulator, Disco, the OpenLink data browser and the Zitgist browser. Examples of Web of Data search engines7 and lookup indexes are Falcons, Sindice, Swoogle and Watson. These services enable humans and machines to locate and query Linked Data that has been published across the Web. 3. THE LDOW2008 WORKSHOP The goal of the workshop is to provide a forum for the Linked Data community, in which participants can present and discuss approaches to publishing Linked Data on the Web, showcase 7http://esw.w3.org/topic/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/ LinkingOpenData/SemanticWebSearchEngines innovative applications that consume Linked Data, and shape the agenda and identify upcoming research issues for the next development stage of the Web of Data.
The program of papers to be presented at the workshop demonstrates ongoing innovation not just in populating the Web of data, but in developing applications that exploit this ecosystem for end users, and in advancing conceptual and architectural issues related to the field. In total 37 papers and demos were submitted for review, of which 23 were accepted for presentation at the workshop and inclusion in the proceedings.
We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the LDOW2008 Program Committee for the efforts they expended in reviewing the submitted papers, and to the WWW2008 organizers for their support of the workshop. For more information about the workshop program please refer to the workshop website: