LDSpider: An open-source crawling framework for the web of linked data

Abstract

The Web of Linked Data is growing and currently consists of several hundred interconnected data sources altogether serving over 25 billion RDF triples to the Web. What has hampered the exploitation of this global dataspace up till now is the lack of an open-source Linked Data crawler which can be employed by Linked Data applications to localize (parts of) the dataspace for further processing. With LDSpider, we are closing this gap in the landscape of publicly available Linked Data tools. LDSpider traverses theWeb of Linked Data by following RDF links between data items, it supports different crawling strategies and allows crawled data to be stored either in files or in an RDF store.