Interacting with linked data via semantically annotated widgets

Abstract

The continuous growth of the Linked Data Web brings us closer to the original vision of the Web as an interconnected network of machine-readable resources. There is, however, an essential aspect in principle still missing from this vision, i.e., the ability for the Web user to interact directly with the Linked Data in a read/write manner. In this paper we introduce a lifecycle and associated mechanism to enable a domain-agnostic read/write interaction with Linked Data in the context of a single data provider. Our solution uses an ontology to build a binding front-end for a given RDF model, in addition to RDFa to maintain the semantics of the resulting form/widget components. On the processing side, a RESTful Web service is provided to seamlessly manage semantic widgets and their associated data, and hence enable the read/write data interaction mechanism. The evaluation shows that the generation process presents no performance issues, while the content overhead required for the actual form-data binding is kept to a minimum. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.