A reflection on the structure and process of the Web of Data
Marko A. Rodriguez · Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2009
The Web community has introduced a set of standards and technologies for representing, querying, and manipulating a globally distributed data structure known as the Web of Data. The proponents of the Web of Data envision much of the world’s data being interrelated and openly accessible to the general public. This vision is analogous in many ways to the Web of Documents of common knowledge, but instead of making documents and media openly accessible, the focus is on making data openly accessible. In providing data for public use, there has been a stimulated interest in a movement dubbed Open Data [4]. Open Data is analogous in many ways to the Open Source movement. However, instead of focusing on software, Open Data is focused on the legal and licensing issues around publicly exposed data. Together, various technological and legal tools are laying the groundwork for the future of globalscale data management on the Web. As of today, in its early form, the Web of Data hosts a variety of data sets that include encyclopedic facts, drug and protein data, metadata on music, books and scholarly articles, social network