A Database Perspective on Consuming Linked Data on the Web

Abstract

During recent years an increasing number of data providers adopted the Linked Data principles for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web, thus creating a globally distributed dataspacethe Web of Data. While the execution of structured, SQL-like queries over this dataspace opens possibilities not conceivable before, query execution on the Web of Data poses novel challenges. These challenges provide great opportunities for the database community. In this article we introduce the concept of Linked Data and discuss different approaches to query the Web of Data. Our goal is to provide a general understanding of this new research area and of the challenges and open issues that must be addressed.