This document provides a tutorial on how to publish Linked Data on the Web. After a general overview of the concept of Linked Data, we describe several practical recipes for publishing information as Linked Data on the Web.
Appendix A: Example HTTP Session
Appendix B: How to get yourself into the Web of Data
Appendix C: Changes
The goal of Linked Data is to enable people to share structured data on the Web as easily as they can share documents today.
The term Linked Data was coined by Tim Berners-Lee in his Linked Data Web architecture note. The term refers to a set of best practices on how to publish and interlink structured data on the Web. The basic assumption behind Linked Data is that the value and usefulness of data increases the more it is interlinked with other data. Therefore, typed links between data items from different data sources are central to Linked Data.
The basic tenets of Linked Data are to:
Applying both principles leads to the creation of a data commons on the Web. This data commons is often called the Web of Data or Semantic Web.
The Web of Data can be accessed using Linked Data browsers (such as Tabulator, Disco and the OpenLink Browser), just as the traditional Web of documents is accessed using HTML browsers. However, instead of following links between HTML pages, Linked Data browsers enable users to navigate between different data sources by following RDF links. This allows the user to start off in one data source, and then move through a potentially endless Web of data sources connected by RDF links. For instance, while looking at data about a person from one source, a user might be interested in information about the person's home town. By following an RDF link, the user can navigate into another dataset providing information about that town.
The Web of Data can also be crawled by following RDF links, just as the traditional document Web is crawled by following hypertext links. Based on the crawled data, search engines can provide sophisticated query capabilities, similar to the query capabilities provided by relational databases today. As query results are themselves structured data, and not just links to HTML pages, they can be processed within various types of applications, thus enabling a new class of applications based on the Web of Data.
The glue that holds together the traditional document Web are hypertext links between HTML pages. The glue of the data web are RDF links. An RDF link simply states that one data item has some kind of relationship to another data item. These relationships can have different types. For instance, an RDF link that connects data about people can state that two people know each other; an RDF link that connects information about a person with information about publications within a bibliographic database might state that a person is the author of a specific paper.
There is already a lot of structured data accessible on the Web through Web 2.0 APIs such as the eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, and Google Base APIs. Compared to these APIs, Linked Data has the advantage of providing a single, standardized access mechanism instead of relying on diverse interfaces and result formats. This allows data sources to be:
Having provided a background to Linked Data concepts, the rest of this document is structured as follows: Section 2 outlines the basic principles of Linked Data. Section 3 provides practical advice on how to name data items with URI references. Section 4 discusses terms from well-known vocabularies and data sources which should be reused to represent information. Section 5 explains what information should be included into RDF descriptions that are published on the Web. Section 6 gives practical advice on how to generate RDF links between data from different data sources. Section 7 presents several complete recipes for publishing different types of information as Linked Data on the Web using existing Linked Data publishing tools. Section 8 discusses testing and debugging Linked Data sources. Finally Section 9 gives an overview about alternative discovery mechanism for Linked Data on the Web.
This chapter describes the basic principles of Linked Data. As Linked Data is closely aligned to the general architecture of the Web, we first summarize the basic principles of this architecture. Then we give an overview about the RDF data model and recommend how the data model should be used in the Linked Data context.
This section summarizes the basic principles of the Web Architecture and introduces terminology such as resource and representation. For more detailed information please refer to the Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One W3C recommendation and the current findings of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG).
Resources
To publish data on the Web, we first have to identify the items of interest in our domain. They are the things whose properties and relation to each other we want to describe in the data. Within Web Architecture terminology, all items of interest are called resources.
Current drafts findings of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) distinguish between two kinds of resources: Information resources and non-information resources (also called 'other resources'). This distinction is quite important in a Linked Data context. All the resources we find on the traditional document Web, such as documents, images, and other media files, are information resources. Many of the things we want to share data about, like people, physical products, places, proteins, scientific concepts, and so on, are not and are therefore called non-information resources. As a rule of thumb, all “real-world objects” that exist outside of the Web are non-information resources.
Resource Identifiers
Resources are identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). In the context of Linked Data, we restrict ourselves to using HTTP URIs only and avoid other URI schemes such as URNs and DOIs. HTTP URIs make good names for two reasons: They provide a simple way to create globally unique names without centralized management; and URIs work not just as a name but also as a means of accessing information about a resource over the Web. The choice to prefer HTTP over other URI schemes is discussed at length in the W3C TAG draft finding URNs, Namespaces and Registries.
Representations
Information resources can have representations. A representation is a stream of bytes in a certain format, such as HTML, RDF/XML, or JPEG. For example, an invoice is an information resource. It could be represented as an HTML page, as a printable PDF document, or as an RDF document. A single information resource can have many different representations, e.g. in different formats, resolution qualities, or natural languages.
Dereferencing HTTP URIs
URI Dereferencing is the process of looking up a URI on the Web in order to get information about the referenced resource. The W3C TAG draft finding about Dereferencing HTTP URIs introduced a distinction on how URIs identifying information resources and non-information resources are dereferenced:
200 OK. 303 See Other. This is called a 303 redirect. In a second step, the client dereferences this new URI and gets a representation describing the original non-information resource. Note: There are two approaches that data publishers can use to provide clients with URIs of information resources describing non-information resources: Hash URIs and 303 redirects. This document focuses mostly on the 303 redirect approach. See Section 4.3 of Cool URIs for the Semantic Web for a discussion of the tradeoffs between both approaches.
Content Negotiation
HTML browsers usually display RDF representations as raw RDF code, something that is not very readable or helpful. Therefore, serving a proper HTML representation in addition to the RDF representation of a resource helps humans to figure out what a URI refers to.
This can be achieved using an HTTP mechanism called content negotiation. HTTP clients send HTTP headers with each request to indicate what kinds of representation they prefer. Servers can inspect those headers and select an appropriate response. If the headers indicate that the client prefers HTML, then the server can generate an HTML representation. If the client prefers RDF, then the server can generate RDF.
Content negotiation for non-information resources is usually implemented like this: When a URI identifying a non-information resource is dereferenced, the server sends a 303 redirect to an information resource appropriate for the client. Therefore, a data source often serves three URIs related to each non-information resource, for instance:
The picture below shows how dereferencing a HTTP URI identifying a non-information resource plays together with content negotiation:
vocabulary URI. If the client is a Linked Data browser and would prefer an RDF/XML representation of the resource, it sends an Accept: application/rdf+xml header along with the request. HTML browsers would send an Accept: text/html header instead.303 See Other response code and sends the client the URI of an information resource describing the non-information resource. In the RDF case: RDF content location. application/rdf+xml.vocabulary URI.
A complete example of a HTTP session for dereferencing a URI identifying a non-information resource is given in Appendix A.
Within an open environment like the Web it often happens that multiple information providers talk about the same non-information resource, for instance a geographic location or a famous person. As they do not know about each other, they introduce different URIs for identifying the same real-world object. For instance: DBpedia a data source providing information that has been extracted from Wikipedia uses the URI http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin to identify Berlin. Geonames is a data source providing information about millions of geographic locations uses the URI http://sws.geonames.org/2950159 to identify Berlin. As both URIs refer to the same non-information resource, they are called URI aliases. URI aliases are common on the Web of Data, as it can not realistically be expected that all information providers agree on the same URIs to identify a non-information resources. URI aliases provide an important social function to the Web of Data as they are dereferenced to different descriptions of the same non-information resource and thus allow different views and opinions to be expressed. In order to still be able to track that different information providers speak about the same non-information resource, it is common practice that information providers set owl:sameAs links to URI aliases they know about. This practice is explained in Section 5 in more detail.
Data Items
Within this tutorial we use a new term, which is not part of the standard Web Architecture terminology but useful within the Linked Data context: Data item. The term data items refers to the description of a non-information resource that a client obtains by dereferencing a specific URI that identifies this non-information resource. For example: Deferencing the URI http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin asking for application/rdf+xml gives you after a redirect a data item that is equal to the RDF description of http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin within the information resource http://dbpedia.org/data/Berlin. Using this new term makes sense in a Linked Data context as it is common practice to use multiple URI aliases to refer to the same non-information resource and as different URI aliases dereference to different descriptions of the resource. When you interpret the Web of Data as a set of interlinked databases, a data item would equal a record in a specific database.
When publishing Linked Data on the Web, we represent information about resources using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF provides a data model that is extremely simple on the one hand but strictly tailored towards Web architecture on the other hand.
In RDF, a description of a resource is represented as a number of triples. The three parts of each triple are called its subject, predicate, and object. A triple mirrors the basic structure of a simple sentence. For example: Chris (subject) has the email address (predicate) chris@bizer.de (object).
The subject of a triple is the URI identifying the described resource. The object can either be a simple literal value, like a string, number, or date; or the URI of another resource that is somehow related to the subject. The predicate, in the middle, indicates what kind of relation exists between subject and object, e.g. is this the name or date of birth (in the case of a literal), or is this the employer or someone the person knows (in the case of another resource). The predicate is a URI too. These predicate URIs come from vocabularies, collections of URIs that can be used to represent information about a certain domain. Please refer to Section 4 for more information about which vocabularies to use in a Linked Data context.
A set of RDF triples can be seen as an RDF graph. The URIs occurring as subject and object URIs are the nodes in the graph, and each triple is a directed arc that connects the subject to the object.
Two principle types of RDF triples can be distinguished: Literal triples and RDF links.
RDF links are the foundation for the Web of Data as dereferencing the URIs that form the parts of the link will give us descriptions of the interlinked resources. These descriptions contain additional RDF links which consist of other URIs that in turn can also be dereferenced, and so on. This is how individual resource descriptions are woven into the Web of Data. This is also how the Web of Data can be navigated using a Linked Data browser or crawled by the robot of a search engine.
Let's take an RDF browser like Disco or Tabulator as an example. The surfer uses to browser to display information about Richard from his FOAF profile. Richard has identified himself with the URI http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf#cygri. When the surfer types this URI into the navigation bar, the browser dereferences this URI over the Web asking for content type application/rdf+xml and displays the retrieved information (click here to have Disco do this). Within his profile, Richard says that he is based near Berlin, using the DBpedia URI http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin as URI alias for the non-information resource Berlin. As the surfer is interested in Berlin, he instructs the browser to dereference this URI by clicking on it. The browser now dereferences this URI asking for application/rdf+xml.
After being redirected with a HTTP 303 response code, the browser retrieves an RDF graph describing Berlin in more detail. A part of this graph is shown below. The graph contains a literal triple stating that Berlin has 3.405.259 inhabitants and another RDF link to a resource representing a list of German cities.
As both RDF graphs share the URI http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin, they naturally merge together, as shown below.
The surfer might also be interested in other German cities. Therefore he lets the browser dereference the URI identifying the list. The retrieved RDF graph contains more RDF links to German cities, for instance, Hamburg and München as shown below.
Seen from a Web perspective, the most valuable RDF links are those that connect a resource to “external” data published by other data sources, because they link up different islands of data into a Web. Technically, such an external RDF link is a RDF triple which has a subject URI from one data source and an object URI from another data source. The box below contains various external RDF links taken from different data sources on the Web.
Examples of External RDF Links
# RDF links taken from DBpedia
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin> owl:sameAs <http://sws.geonames.org/2950159> .
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Berners-Lee> owl:sameAs <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007> .
# RDF links taken from Tim Berners-Lee's FOAF profile
<http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i> owl:sameAs <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Berners-Lee> .
<http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i> foaf:knows <http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/#me> .
# RDF links taken from Richard Cyganiaks's FOAF profile
<http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf#cygri> foaf:knows <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i> .
<http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf#cygri> foaf:topic_interest <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Semantic_Web> .
Benefits of using the RDF Data Model in the Linked Data Context
The main benefits of using the RDF data model in a Linked Data context are that:
RDF Features Best Avoided in the Linked Data Context
In order to make it easier for clients to merge and query your data, we recommend not to use the full expressivity of the RDF data model, but a subset of the RDF features. Especially:
Resources are named with URI references. When publishing Linked Data, you should put some effort into choosing good URIs for your resources.
On the one hand, they should be good names that other publishers can use confidently to link to your resources in their own data. On the other hand, you will have to put technical infrastructure in place to make them dereferenceable, and this may put some constraints on what you can do.
This section lists, in loose order, some things to keep in mind.
Why have two separate information resources (2. and 3. in each example) about the same thing? Couldn't we use a single information resource with two representations? The argument for separate resources is given in the W3C TAG Finding On Linking Alternative Representations To Enable Discovery And Publishing: Sometimes we want to refer to a specific format using a URI, and URIs are cheap, so it's good to have the separate resources.
Examples of cool URIs:
See also:
In order to make it as easy as possible for client applications to process your data, you should reuse terms from well-known vocabularies wherever possible. You should only define new terms yourself if you can not find required terms in existing vocabularies.
A set of well-known vocabularies has evolved in the Semantic Web community. Please check whether your data can be represented using terms from these vocabularies before defining any new terms:
A more extensive list of well-know vocabularies is maintained by the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project within the ESW Wiki. A listing of the 100 most common RDF namespaces (August 2006) is provided by UMBC eBiquity Group.
It is common practice to mix terms from different vocabularies. We especially recommend the use of rdfs:label and foaf:depiction properties whenever possible as these terms are supported by many client applications.
If you need URI references for identifying general-purpose concepts like geographic places, research areas, general topics, artists, books or CDs, you should consider using concept URIs from data sources within the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project, for instance Geonames, DBpedia, Musicbrainz, dbtune or the RDF Book Mashup. The benefits of using concept URIs from these data sources are two-fold:
A more extensive list of datasets with dereferenceable URIs is maintained by the Linking Open Data community project within the ESW Wiki.
Good examples of how terms from different well-known vocabularies are mixed in one document and how existing concept URIs are reused are given by the FOAF profiles of Tim Berners-Lee and Ivan Herman.
You should only define terms that are not already defined within well-known vocabularies. In particular this means not defining completely new vocabularies from scratch, but instead extending existing vocabularies to represent your data as required.
You can define vocabularies using the RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema or the Web Ontology Language (OWL). In open environments like the Web where multiple parties publish vocabulary definitions and refer to vocabulary definitions from other people it is essential that vocabulary definitions:
The following example contains a definition of a class and a property following the rules above. The example uses the Turtle syntax. Namespace declarations are omitted.
# Definition of the class "Lover"
<http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/LoveVocabulary#Lover>
rdf:type rdfs:Class ;
rdfs:label "Lover"@en ;
rdfs:label "Liebender"@de ;
rdfs:comment "A person who loves somebody."@en ;
rdfs:comment "Eine Person die Jemanden liebt."@de ;
rdfs:subClassOf foaf:Person .
# Definition of the property "loves"
<http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/LoveVocabublary#love>
rdf:type rdf:Property ;
rdfs:label "loves"@en ;
rdfs:label "lieben"@de ;
rdfs:comment "Relation between a lover and a loved person."@en ;
rdfs:comment "Beziehung zwischen einem Liebenden und einer geliebten Person."@de ;
rdfs:subPropertyOf foaf:knows ;
rdfs:range foaf:Person ;
rdfs:domain <http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/LoveVocabulary#Lover> .
So, assuming we have expressed all our data in RDF triples: What triples should go into the RDF representation that is returned (after a 303 redirect) in response to dereferencing the URI of a data item?
application/x-turtle. In situations where your think people might want to use your data together with XML technologies such as XSLT or XQuery, you might additionally also serve a TriX serialization, as TriX works better with these technologies than RDF/XML. In the following, we give two examples of RDF descriptions following the rules above. The first example covers the case of an authorative representation served by a URI owner. The second example covers the case of non-authorative information served by somebody who is not the owner of the described URI.
1. Authoritative Description
The following example shows parts of the Turtle representation of the information resource http://dbpedia.org/data/Alec_Empire. The resource describes the German musician Alec Empire. Using Web Architecture terminology, it is a authoritative description as it is served after a 303 redirect by the owner of the URI http://dbpedia.org/resource/Alec_Empire. Namespace declarations are omitted:
# Metadata and Licensing Information
<http://dbpedia.org/data/Alec_Empire>
rdfs:label "RDF description of Alec Empire" ;
rdf:type foaf:Document ;
dc:author <http://dbpedia.org/resource/DBpedia> ;
dc:date "2007-07-13"^^xsd:date ;
dc:rights <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License> .
# The description
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Alec_Empire>
foaf:name "Empire, Alec" ;
rdf:type foaf:Person ;
rdf:type <http://dbpedia.org/class/yago/musician> ;
rdfs:comment "Alec Empire (born May 2, 1972) is a German musician who is best known ..."@en ;
rdfs:comment "Alec Empire (eigentlich Alexander Wilke) ist ein deutscher Musiker. Bekannt wurde ..."@de ;
dbpedia:genre <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Techno> ;
dbpedia:associatedActs <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Atari_Teenage_Riot> ;
foaf:page <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Empire> ;
foaf:page <http://dbpedia.org/page/Alec_Empire> ;
rdfs:isDefinedBy <http://dbpedia.org/data/Alec_Empire> ;
owl:sameAs <http://zitgist.com/music/artist/d71ba53b-23b0-4870-a429-cce6f345763b> .
# Backlinks
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/60_Second_Wipeout> dbpedia:producer <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Alec_Empire> .
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Limited_Editions_1990-1994> dbpedia:artist <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Alec_Empire> .
Note that the description contains an owl:sameAs Link stating that http://dbpedia.org/resource/Alec_Empire and http://zitgist.com/music/artist/d71ba53b-23b0-4870-a429-cce6f345763b are URI aliases
referring
to the same non-information resource.
In order to make it easier for Linked Data clients to understand the relation between http://dbpedia.org/resource/Alec_Empire, http://dbpedia.org/data/Alec_Empire, and http://dbpedia.org/page/Alec_Empire, the URIs can be interlinked using the rdfs:isDefinedBy and the foaf:page property as recommended in the Cool URI paper.
2. Non-Authoritative Description
The following example shows the Turtle representation of the information resource http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/ChrisAboutRichard which is published by Chris to provide information about Richard. Note that Richard owns the URI http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf#cygri and is therefore the only person who can provide an authoritative description for this URI. Thus using Web Architecture terminology, Chris is providing non-authoritative information about Richard.
# Metadata and Licensing Information
<http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/ChrisAboutRichard>
rdf:type foaf:Document ;
dc:author <http://www.bizer.de#chris> ;
dc:date "2007-07-13"^^xsd:date ;
cc:license <http://web.resource.org/cc/PublicDomain> .
# The description
<http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf#cygri>
foaf:name "Richard Cyganiak" ;
foaf:topic_interest <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Databases> ;
foaf:topic_interest <http://dbpedia.org/resource/MacBook_Pro> ;
rdfs:isDefinedBy <http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf> ; rdf:seeAlso
<http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/ChrisAboutRichard> .
# Backlinks
<http://www.bizer.de#chris> foaf:knows <http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf#cygri> . <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/is-group/resource/projects/Project3> doap:developer
<http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf#cygri> .
Which RDF properties are used as predicates within RDF links completely depends on the application domain. Commonly used linking properties within the domain of describing people are for instance foaf:knows, foaf:based_near and foaf:topic_interest . Examples of combining these properties with property values from DBpedia, the DBLP bibliography and the RDF Book Mashup are found in Tim Berners-Lee's and Ivan Herman's FOAF profiles.
It is common practice to use the owl:sameAs property for stating that another data source also provides information about a specific non-information resource. An owl:sameAs link indicates that two URI references actually refer to the same thing. Therefore, owl:sameAs is used to map between different URI aliases (see Section 2.1). Examples of using owl:same to indicate that two URIs talk about the same thing are again Tim's FOAF profile which states that http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i identifies the same resource as http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/persons/Tim+Berners-Lee and http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007. Other usage examples are found within DBpedia and the Berlin DBLP server.
RDF links can be set manually, which is usually the case for FOAF profiles, or they can be generated by automated linking algorithms. This approach is usually taken to interlink large datasets consisting of thousands of data items.
To manually set RDF links you first need an idea about the datasets you want to link to. In order to get an overview of different datasets that can be used as linking targets please refer to the Linking Open Data Dataset list. Once you have identified particular datasets as suitable linking targets, you can manually search within these for the URI references you want to link to. If a data source doesn't provide a search interface, for instance a SPARQL endpoint or a HTML Web form, you can use Linked Data browsers like Tabulator or Disco to explore the dataset and find the right URIs.
You can also use services such as Uriqr or Sindice to search for existing URIs and to choose the most popular one if you find several candidates. Uriqr allows you to find URIs for people you know, simply by searching for their name. Results are ranked according to how heavily a particular URI is referenced in RDF documents on the Web, but you will need to apply a little bit of human intelligence in picking the most appropriate URI to use. Sindice indexes the Semantic Web and can tell you which sources mention a certain URI. Therefore the service can help you to choose the most popular URI for a concept.
Remember that data sources might use HTTP-303 redirects to redirect clients from URIs identifying non-information resources to URIs identifying information resources that describe the non-information resources. In this case, make sure that you link to the URI reference identifying the non-information resource, and not the document about it.
The approach described above does not scale to large datasets, for instance interlinking 70 000 places in DBpedia to their corresponding entries in Geonames. In such cases, it makes sense to use an automated record linkage algorithm to generate RDF links between data sources.
Record Linkage is a well-known problem in the databases community. The Linking Open Data Project collects material related to using record linkage algorithms in the Linked Data context on the Equivalence Mining wiki page.
There is still a lack of good, easy-to-use tools to auto-generate RDF links. Therefore it is common practice to implement dataset-specific record linkage algorithms to generate RDF links between data sources. In the following we describe two classes of such algorithms:
Pattern-based Algorithms
Within various domains, there are generally accepted naming schemata. For instance, in the publication domain there are ISBN numbers, in the financial domain there are ISIN identifiers. If these identifiers are used as part of HTTP URIs identifying particular data items, it is possible to use simple pattern-based algorithms to generate RDF links between data items.
An example of a data source using ISBN numbers as part of its URIs is the RDF Book Mashup, which for instance uses the URI http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/books/0747581088 to identify the book 'Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince'. Having the ISBN number in these URIs made it easy for DBpedia to generate owl:sameAs links between books within DBpedia and the Book Mashup. DBpedia uses the following pattern-based algorithm:
Running this algorithm against all books within DBpedia resulted in 9000 RDF links which were merged with the DBpedia dataset. For instance, the resulting link for the Harry Potter book is:
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Harry_Potter_and_the_Half-Blood_Prince owl:sameAs
http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/books/0747581088
More complex property-based Algorithms
In cases where no common identifiers across datasets exist, it is necessary to employ more complex property-based linkage algorithms. We outline two algorithms below:
This chapter provides practical recipes for publishing different types of information as Linked Data on the Web. Information has to fulfill the following minimal requirements to be considered "published as Linked Data on the Web":
application/rdf+xml, a data source must return an RDF/XML description of the data item.Which of the following recipes fits your needs depends on various factors, such as:
After you have published your information as Linked Data, you should ensure that there are external RDF links pointing at data items from your dataset, so that RDF browser and crawlers can find your data. There are two basic ways of doing this:
The simplest way to serve Linked Data is to produce static RDF files, and upload them to a web server. This approach is typically chosen in situations where
There are several issues to consider:
Older web servers are sometimes configured to return a wrong MIME type when serving RDF/XML files. Linked Data browsers may not recognize RDF data served in this way because the server claims that it is not RDF/XML but plain text. To find out if your server needs fixing, use cURL tool and the steps outlined in this tutorial.
How to fix this depends on the web server. In the case of Apache, add this line to the httpd.conf configuration file, or to an .htaccess file in the web server's directory where the RDF files are placed:
AddType application/rdf+xml .rdf
This tells Apache to serve files with an .rdf extension using the correct MIME type for RDF/XML, application/rdf+xml. Note this means you have to name your files with the .rdf extension.
Where you're at it, you can also add these lines to make your web server ready for other RDF syntaxes (N3 and Turtle):
AddType text/rdf+n3;charset=utf-8 .n3 AddType application/x-turtle .ttl
On the document Web, it's bad to publish huge HTML pages, because they load very slowly in browsers and consume unnecessary bandwidth. The same is true when publishing Linked Data: Your RDF files shouldn't be larger than, say, a few hundred kByte. If your files are larger and describe multiple resources, you should break them up into several RDF files, or use Pubby as described in recipe 7.3 to serve them in chunks.
When you serve multiple RDF files, make sure they are linked to each other through RDF triples that involve resources from two files.
Out of the box, the static file approach doesn't support the 303 redirects required for the URIs of non-information resources. Fortunately there is another standards-compliant method of naming non-information resources, which works very well with static RDF files, but has a downside we will discuss later. This method relies on hash URIs.
When you serve a static RDF file at, say, http://example.com/people.rdf, then you should name the non-information resources described in the file by appending a fragment identifier to the file's URI. The identifier must be unique within the file. That way, you end up with URIs like this for your non-information resources:
This works because HTTP clients dereference hash URIs by stripping off the part after the hash and dereferencing the resulting URI. A Linked Data browser will then look into the response (the RDF file in this case), and find triples that tell it more about the non-information resource, achieving an effect quite similar to the 303 redirect.
The downside of this naming approach is that the URIs are not very "cool" according to the criteria set out in section 3. There's a reference to a specific representation format in the identifiers (the .rdf extension). And if you choose to rename the RDF file later on, or decide to split your data into several files, then all identifiers will change and existing links to them will break.
That's why you should use this approach only if the overall structure and size of the dataset are unlikely to change much in the future, or as a quick-and-dirty solution for transient data where link stability isn't so important.
This approach can be extended to use 303 redirects and even to support content negotiation. Unfortunately the process for doing so is very dependent on the type and specific configuration of your web server. The W3C has published several recipes that show how to do this for the Apache web server: Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies. The document is officially targeted at publishers of RDF vocabularies, but the recipes work for other kinds of RDF data served from static files. Note that at the time of writing there is still an issue with content negotiation within this document which might be solved by moving from Apache mod_rewrite to mod_negotiation.
If your data is stored in a relational database it is usually a good idea to leave it there and just publish a Linked Data view on your existing database.
A tool for serving Linked Data views on relational databases is D2R Server. D2R server relies on a declarative mapping between the schemata of the database and the target RDF terms. Based on this mapping, D2R Server serves a Linked Data view on your database and provides a SPARQL endpoint for the database.
There are several D2R Servers online, for example Berlin DBLP Bibliography Server, Hannover DBLP Bibliography Server, Web-based Systems @ FU Berlin Group Server or the EuroStat Countries and Regions Server.
Publishing a relational database as Linked Data typically involves the following steps:
If your information is currently represented in formats such as CSV, Microsoft Excel, or BibTEX and you want to serve the information as Linked Data on the Web it is usually a good idea to do the following:
The approach described above is taken by the DBpedia project, among others. The project uses PHP scripts to extract structured data from Wikipedia pages. This data is then converted to RDF and stored in a OpenLink Virtuoso repository which provides a SPARQL endpoint. In order to get a Linked Data view, Pubby is put in front of the SPARQL endpoint.
If your dataset is sufficiently small to fit completely into the web server's main memory, then you can do without the RDF repository, and instead use Pubby's conf:loadRDF option to load the RDF data from an RDF file directly into Pubby. This might be simpler, but unlike a real RDF repository, Pubby will keep everything in main memory and doesn't offer a SPARQL endpoint.
Large numbers of Web applications have started to make their data available on the Web through Web APIs. Examples of data sources providing such APIs include eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google and Google Base. An more comprehensive API list is found at Programmable Web. Different APIs provide diverse query and retrieval interfaces and return results using a number of different formats such as XML, JSON or ATOM. This leads to three general limitations of Web APIs:
These limitations can be overcome by implementing Linked Data wrappers around APIs. In general, Linked Data wrappers do the following:
application/rdf+xml, the wrapper rewrites the client's request into a request against the underlying API.Examples of Linked Data Wrappers include:
The RDF Book Mashup
The RDF Book Mashup makes information about books, their authors, reviews, and online bookstores available as RDF on the Web. The RDF Book Mashup assigns a HTTP URI to each book that has an ISBN number. Whenever one of these URIs is dereferenced, the Book Mashup requests data about the book, its author as well as reviews and sales offers from the Amazon API and the Google Base API. This data is then transformed into RDF and returned to the client.
The RDF Book Mashup is implemented as a small PHP script which can be used as a template for implementing similar wrappers around other Web APIs. More information about the Book Mashup and the relationship of Web APIs to Linked Data in general is available in The RDF Book Mashup: From Web APIs to a Web of Data (Slides).
SIOC Exporters for WordPress, Drupal, phpBB
The SIOC project has developed Linked Data wrappers for several popular blogging engines, content management systems and discussion forums. See SIOC Exporters for an up-to-date list of their wrappers. The project also provides a PHP Export API which enables developers to create further SIOC export tools without the need to get into technical details about how information is represented in RDF.
After you have published information as Linked Data on the Web, you should test whether your information can be accessed correctly.
An easy way of testing is to see whether your information displays correctly within different Linked Data browsers and whether the browsers can follow RDF links within your data. Therefore, take several URIs from your dataset and enter them into the navigation bar of the following Linked Data browsers:
If you run into problems, you should do the following:
If you can not figure out yourself what is going wrong, ask on the Linking Open Data mailing list for help.
The standard way of discovering Linked Data on the Web is by following RDF Links within data the client already knows. In order to further ease discovery information providers can decide to support additional discovery mechanisms.
Ping the Semantic Web
Ping the Semantic Web is a registry service for RDF documents on the Web, which is used by several other services and client applications. Therefore, you can improve the discoverability of your data by registering your URIs with Ping The Semantic Web.
HTML LINK Auto-Discovery
It makes also sense in many cases to set links from a existing webpages to RDF data, for instance from your personal home page to your FOAF profile. Such links can be set using the HTML <link> element in the <head> of your HTML page.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml" href="link_to_the_RDF_version" />
HTML <link> elements are use by browser extensions like Piggybank or Semantic Radar to discover RDF data on the Web.
Dataset List on the ESW Wiki
In order to make it easy not only for machines but also for humans to discover your data, you should add your dataset to the Dataset List on the ESW Wiki. Beside of a link to project, please put some example URIs from your dataset into the Wiki, so that people have starting points for browsing your dataset.
For more information about Linked Data please refer to:
Overview Material and Theoretical Background
Technical Documentation
Projects and Practical Experience with Publishing Linked Data
Linked Data Clients
This is an example HTTP session where a Linked Data browser tries to dereference the URI http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin, a URI for the city of Berlin, published by the DBpedia project.
To obtain a representation, the client connects to the dbpedia.org server and issues an HTTP GET request:
GET /resource/Berlin HTTP/1.1 Host: dbpedia.org Accept: text/html;q=0.5, application/rdf+xml
The client sends an Accept: header to indicate that it would take either HTML or RDF; the q=0.5 quality value for HTML shows that it prefers RDF. The server could answer:
HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Location: http://dbpedia.org/data/Berlin
This is a 303 redirect, which tells the client that the requested resource is a non-information resource, and related information can be found at the URI given in the Location: response header. Next the client will try to dereference that URI. Note that if the Accept: header had indicated a preference for HTML, we would have been redirected to another URI.
GET /data/Berlin HTTP/1.1 Host: dbpedia.org Accept: text/html;q=0.5, application/rdf+xml
The server could answer:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/rdf+xml;charset=utf-8 <?xml version="1.0"?> <rdf:RDF xmlns:units="http://dbpedia.org/units/" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:geonames="http://www.geonames.org/ontology#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" ...
The 200 status code tells the client that the response contains the representation of an information resource. The Content-Type: header tells us that the representation is in RDF/XML format. The rest of the message contains the representation. Only the beginning is shown.
A great way to get started with publishing Linked Data on the Web is to serve a static RDF file; this can work well for small amounts of relatively simple data. One common example of this practice is providing a Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) file alongside (and interlinked with) your HTML home page. This Appendix provides step-by-step instructions on how to create and publish a FOAF description of yourself, and how to link it into the Web of Data.
FOAF-a-Matic is a web form that will generate a basic FOAF description for you in RDF/XML (which we will call your "FOAF file" from now onwards). This provides an excellent starting point to which you can add additional data. After generating your FOAF profile using FOAF-a-Matic, you'll need to save the generated RDF/XML code as a static file (using the filename foaf.rdf is a common convention) and decide where it will be hosted. Technically your FOAF file can be hosted anywhere on the Web, although it's common practice to use your own Web space and place it in the same directory as your home page. For example, Richard Cyganiak's FOAF file is located at http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf; this is the URI of the RDF document, the document describes Richard, who is identified by the URI http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf#cygri.
By default FOAF-a-Matic will use a fragment identifier (such as #me) to refer to you within your FOAF file. This fragment identifier is appended to the URI of your FOAF file to form your URI, of the form http://yourdomain.com/foaf.rdf#me. Congratulations, you now have a URI which can be used to identify you in other RDF statements on the Web of Data. Your URI is an example of a "hash URI", discussed in more detail in Section 7.1.
At this stage you will want to start linking your FOAF file into the Web.
One good place to start is by linking to your FOAF file from your
homepage, using the HTML LINK Auto-Discovery technique from Section 9, but don't stop there. To really put your FOAF file into the Web of Data you need to read on and implement the guidance in the following sections.
Change Blank Nodes to URI references
At present FOAF-a-Matic uses "blank nodes" to identify people you know, not URI references, as the system has no way of knowing the appropriate URIs to associate with each person. Example output with blank nodes is shown below:
...
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>362ce75324396f0aa2d3e5f1246f40bf3bb44401</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
<foaf:name>Dan Brickley</foaf:name>
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf"/>
</foaf:Person>
</foaf:knows>
...
This is valid RDF but isn't good Linked Data, as blank nodes make it much harder to link and merge data across different sources (see Section 2.2 for a full discussion of these issues). Therefore, the first thing to do in making your FOAF file into Linked Data is to replace the blank nodes identifying people you know with URI references.
Link to your friends
Section 6.1 explains how to set RDF links manually, and describes two services (Uriqr and Sindice) that you can use to find existing URIs for people you know. Following this approach we can find out that the existing URI http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf#danbri identifies Dan Brickley, and replace the blank node generated by FOAF-a-Matic with this URI reference. The result would look like this:
...
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person rdf:about="http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf#danbri">
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>362ce75324396f0aa2d3e5f1246f40bf3bb44401</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
<foaf:name>Dan Brickley</foaf:name>
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf"/>
</foaf:Person>
</foaf:knows>
...
After setting links to people you know, there are many other ways in which you can link your FOAF file into the Web of Data. Here we will discuss two of these.
Tell people where you live
A common thing to include in your FOAF file is information about where you are based, using the foaf:based_near property. This isn't supported by FOAF-a-Matic, so you'll need to add the code in manually. Add the following line somewhere inside the <foaf:Person rdf:ID="me"></foaf:Person> element, replacing the object of the triple with the URI reference of the place nearest to where you are based.
<foaf:based_near rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Milton_Keynes"/>
Using URIs from DBpedia or Geonames ensures that you are linking your FOAF file to well-established URIs which are also likely to be used by others, therefore making the Web more interconnected.
How to link to your publications
If you have ever written a book or published an academic paper in Computer Science, a URI may already have been created for you in the RDF version of DBLP or in the RDF Book Mashup. At a general level, how to handle this issue is touched upon under URI Aliases in Section 2.1. In summary, you simply need to link to them with a statement saying that they identify the same thing as the URI identifying you in your FOAF file. Section 6 describes how this should be done using the owl:sameAs property.
2007-07-18: Added new section 7.1 from Richard. Added Apendix B from Tom.
2007-07-17: Updated the document with feedback from
François-Paul Servant and
Leo Sauermann.
2007-07-14: Moved FOAF example into Appendix B. Updated images in section two.
2007-07-13: Updated the document with feedback from Ivan Herman,
Joshua Shinavier
, Giovanni Tummarello,
Yves Raimond.
2007-07-12: Small edits across the document by Chris. Sindice added.
2007-07-11: Initial version of this document.