Web of Data

Abstract

This chapter discusses the abstract concepts necessary to realise a Web of Data. We discuss how the content on the Web can be represented as graph-structured data in order to increase machine readability. We show how queries can be structured in a similar fashion to the data in order to automate their evaluation. We motivate the need for formal semantics, which makes explicit what the terms used in the data mean in relation to each other. We illustrate the need for constraints in order to automatically validate data. We further describe how links can be used to connect and discover data on the Web. In order to showcase the practical benefits of adopting these concepts, we look at four prominent scenarios in which they are currently being used on the Web: Wikidata, Knowledge Graphs, Schema.org, and Linking Open Data.