Linked Data

In this weeks blog entry I will talk about Tim Berners-Lee's (original creator of the World Wide) new notion of Linked-Data. We were introduced to this topic in our last IAD session on the 20th October.

The main idea of Linked Data involves sharing and linking data together. Every user puts their data up on the Internet and related data gets linked together. This is basically the concept of Linked Data. It's useful because it makes it easier for people to find information, but most of all, all the data put up on the web by people can be gathered, combined and transformed into something much more useful.

We looked at the GapminderWorld web application on gapminder.org. This application illustrates the useful benefits that can be obtained using Linked Data. This application makes use of a lot of different data about global developmentfrom various different sources and combines them together and produces a useful and easy to understand graphical presentation.



Tim Berners-Lee On Linked-Data



The above is a video taken from the TED website. Tim Berners-Lee Explains Linked-Data in a really good and non-technical way. He explains amongst other things, that there will be a collection of data on the Internet, i.e. a database and as a result of Linked-Data they will be interrelated. Data providers will obviously include the general public, the Government and even private companies such as pharmaceutical companies. Benefit from Linked Data can be, e.g. in research, the data from millions of people can be vary useful.