Slides from the ISKO-UK event on 3 November at UCL.

The Open Data Movement aims at making data freely available to everyone. There are already various interesting open data sets available on the Web. Examples include Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Geonames, MusicBrainz, WordNet, the DBLP bibliography and many more which are published under Creative Commons or Talis licenses. The goal of the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project is to extend the Web with a data commons by publishing various open data sets as RDF on the Web and by setting RDF links between data items from different data sources. RDF links enable you to navigate from a data item within one data source to related data items within other sources using a Semantic Web browser. RDF links can also be followed by the crawlers of Semantic Web search engines, which may provide sophisticated search and query capabilities over crawled data. As query results are structured data and not just links to HTML pages, they can be used within other applications. The figure below shows the data sets that have been published and interlinked by the project so far. Collectively, the data sets consist of over two billion RDF triples, which are interlinked by around 3 million RDF links (October 2007).