Introduction to Linked Open Data

Bootcamp: Introduction to Linked Open Data 

Authors: Felix Ostrowski

and Adrian Pohl  

 

Audience: People interested in the *basics* of Linked Open Data

Expertise: People should be familiar with WWW basics

Required: Internet connection, Laptop

Programming experience: none

 

Linked Open Data has gained a lot of attention during the last two years, with projects moving increasingly from theory to practice. The library domain is gearing more and more towards the technical and legal issues implied by this paradigm shift, with the recent announcement of [A Bibliographic Framework for the Digital

Age](http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/news/framework-103111.html) by Library of Congress and the Conference of European National Librarians [affirmation of open licensing for their

data](http://app.e2ma.net/app2/campaigns/archived/1403149/f14691f55d5483aff43360a9b4aa7d35/)

being only two examples.

 

This introductory workshop aims to introduce the fundamentals of the underlying technologies on the one hand, and the basic legal issues on the other. The RDF data model will be discussed, along with the concepts of dereferencable URIs and common vocabularies. The participants will continuously create and refine RDF documents to strengthen their knowledge on the topic. Linked Data tenets such as publishing RDF descriptions in a web environment and utilizing Content-Negotiation will be demonstrated and applied by the participants. Aggregating data from several sources and querying this data will showcase the advantages of publishing Linked Data, and RDF Schema will be introduced as an effective way of data integration. On a side track, Open Data principles will be introduced, discussed and applied to the content that is being created during the workshop.

 

Workshop outcomes:

The participants will have created openly licenced RDF descriptions of themselves, published these to a webserver, aggregated the data into a triplestore against which SPARQL queries are then executed. The possibilities of using RDFs to integrate data across vocabularies have been explored.