Linked Data work (anecdotical)

Preparation of the data

Recently I have been giving a few talks on Linked Data.

To clarify a few points I builded a playtoy example, according to the rules of Linked Data.

Rule 1: Use URIs as names for things
So I gave myself a URI: http://www.proxml.be/People/Paul

Rule 2: Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names
Rule 3: When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information (RDF)

I build a RDF file using mainly the FOAF vocabulary to describe myself.
When HTTP GETing my unique identifier I made sure my webserver dereferences it to http://www.proxml.be/People/Paul.rdf using the well-known content negotiation technique as described in Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF vocabularies and Recipes for Serving Information as Linked Data.



The RDF as shown in Firefox with Tabulator.

Rule 4: Include links to other HTTP URIs so that they can discover more things

I have some favorite musicians and I wanted them to be the object of my foaf property "topic_interest".
I looked up their unique identifiers using the <sameAs> lookup service and used the id's as used by DBPedia.



Now that I had everything in place, I made sure my identifier was known to the Linked Data world by submitting my id, which (remember) is dereferencable, to the linked data cloud search engines such as Sindice, Watson, Swoogle, Falcons, ...

Die Aha Erlebnis

In the same talks I also wanted to show some Linked Data Browsers.

I fired up Marbles, pasted the URI of Maria Schneider and did get this page.

with this interesting fragment (the reverse of the relation coming from my foaf file):


I surely hope other persons will also out themselves as fans of Maria in the linked data cloud, since for now I'm feeling a little bit lonely.
But I think the Linked Data point has proven itself clearly.