Exhibit: Lightweight structured data publishing

Abstract

The early Web was hailed for giving individuals the same publishing power as large content providers. But over time, large content providers learned to exploit the structure in their data, leveraging databases and server side technologies to provide rich browsing and visualization. Individual authors fall behind once more: neither old-fashioned static pages nor domain-specific publishing frameworks supporting limited customization can match custom database-backed web applications. In this paper, we propose Exhibit, a lightweight framework for publishing structured data on standard web servers that requires no installation, database administration, or programming. Exhibit lets authors with relatively limited skills-those same enthusiasts who could write HTML pages for the early Web-publish richly interactive pages that exploit the structure of their data for better browsing and visualization. Such structured publishing in turn makes that data more useful to all of its consumers: individual readers get more powerful interfaces, mashup creators can more easily repurpose the data, and Semantic Web enthusiasts can feed the data to the nascent Semantic Web.