Linked Data

Benefits include:

• Accessible live data at low cost

– access over the web at fine grain, individual data-item level without needing specialized programming or APIs.

• More meaningful data

– since each item has a web address, it can be annotated and referenced to provide context.

• No more silos

– all data is linked to its information model and to related data enabling information to be combined across silos.

See Whitepaper: Linked Data in the Enterprise

Main Features of Linked Data:

No need for specialized APIs to access data

This is accomplished through dereferenceable URIs for data items. Dereferencing is a fancy name for a resource retrieval mechanism that uses HTTP(S) to return representation of the identified resource. You may say “What is new?”:

• In the context of traditional HTML web pages, this is, indeed, the normal way of working. A URI refers to the page, and, when requested, the web server returns a copy of it.
• However, in traditional systems data items, even when identified by a URI, are non-dereferenceable. There is no way to use the URI to get information about a specific data item.

With Linked Data, using URI of an item, returns its representation as a document (either HTML, serialization of RDF, XML or JSON). The returned description contains not only text, but also the URIs of related resources – even when related resources belong to a different dataset. As a result, a user or a program can do “follow your nose” retrieval to find out more and more information. No specialized APIs are needed. You simply use URIs to request more information. This extra context can help drive further application behavior.

Self-describing data

Linked Data is self-describing because resource descriptions:

• include type information where type is provided as a URI of the relevant class
• provide URI for every property (relationship, attribute) used in the description
• link to terminology from reference sources

If an application consuming Linked Data encounters data described with an unfamiliar vocabulary, the application can dereference the URIs of classes and properties in order to find their definitions.

TopQuadrant Solution

All TopBraid server products publish information as Linked Data. Usage of semantic web standards, not only as an export format, but as the way to represent data internally allows us to bring Linked Data to its full potential. Supporting Linked Data in this comprehensive way enables enterprises to transform diverse information into semantic assets, and to evolve their information infrastructure into a semantic ecosystem.

TopQuadrant has deep expertise in Semantic Web technology and Linked Data solutions:

• TopQuadrant’s TopSAIL, a proven methodology and best practices that aligns business needs with technology capabilities to implement Linked Data projects consistently, rapidly, and cost-effectively.
• TopQuadrant Expert Solution Services, Training and Competency Development to help your organization implement Enterprise Linked Data clouds and take advantage of the growing number of publicly available Linked Data sources.

For more information or to schedule a demo, contact us at sales@topquadrant.com.

TopBraid Linked Data Products

TopBraid Enterprise Data Governance™ (EDG) is an agile data governance environment for the dynamic enterprise; it provides integrated data governance across the ever growing types of data assets and governance needs.

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TopBraid Enterprise Vocabulary Net (TopBraid EVN)

Initial phases of a Linked Data project might start with the creation of a SKOS taxonomy or RDF/OWL ontology enriched by information from other linked data sources.

All items in TopBraid EVN vocabularies can be accessed not only through web services and standard APIs like SPARQL, but also through URI dereferencing. Vocabularies provide common metadata and reference data helping your information to become a self-describing digital asset to build semantically enhanced applications or mashups.

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TopBraid Live (TBL)

TBL is a Linked Data Server for publishing enterprise information as Linked Data inside corporate firewall or as Linked Open Data on the (semantic) web.

Data in enterprises is very diverse. Its structure can evolve frequently with business needs. This poses a great challenge for applications based on that data. TopBraid platform address this problem by using a flexible data model that supports integration of heterogeneous and volatile data. Using graph-based RDF model allows us to incrementally extend schemas. Models based on open standards make the effort future-proof.

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