Sharing linked open data over peer-to-peer distributed file systems: The case of IPFS

Abstract

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a method of publishing machine-readable open data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful through semantic querying. The decentralized nature of the current LOD cloud relies on location-specific services, which is known to result in problems of availability and broken links. Current approaches to peer-to-peer (P2P) decentralized file systems could be used to support better availability and performance and provide permanent data, while preserving LOD principles. Applications would also benefit from mechanisms that ensure that LOD entities are permanent and immutable, independently of their original publishers. This paper outlines a first prototype design of LOD over the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a P2P system based on Merkel DAGs and a content-addressed block storage model. The fundamental ideas on that implementation are discussed and an example implementation on the early version of IPFS is described, showing the feasibility of such approach and its main differentiating features.