The entity-centric web
Paolo Bouquet · 2011
Thanks to initiatives like Linked Data and Open Government Data, the Semantic Web is evolving toward an open web of data, where anyone - from large public administrations to single web users - can publish data in different formats and make them part of a huge global space of knowledge. Several good practices have been proposed to increase the effectiveness of data publication, including the well-known linked data principles and the 5-star scheme for open data. In this talk, I will stress a good practice which is not addressed yet, namely the need to decouple the URIs which identify non-digital resources (I call them entities, like people, organizations, products, events, location) from the URIs which point to a specific dataset about the same entity (for example, the URI for Amman in DBpedia). I will argue that this is indeed a potential 6th star on top of the Berners-Lee's 5-star scheme and may lead to a truly entity-centic (semantic) web. In the talk, I will show how this can be technically achieved through an open service called Entity Name System - ENS (developed as part of the EU co-funded project OKKAM). I will then illustrate the great advantages of this practice, the new uses which are enabled by its adoption and a few examples of applications in different domains, from tax collection to the creation of smart QR-codes for products.