Conference Proceedings for XTech 2008

The current ubiquitous Web is a “Web of Documents” where documents (Web pages) are connected by embedded hyperlinks (URLs or Uniform Resource Locators). The popularity of the “Web of Documents” (or “Document Web”) sometimes obscures the fact that from the onset Tim Berners-Lee envisaged a broader “Web of Data”. In this broader “Data Web”, data items are uniquely identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), with these data items connected by typed links conveying implicit meaning (semantics) resulting in sparse or dense clusters of “Linked Data.”

Only recently have people started to understand the broader “Web of Data”, due to users demanding their right to reuse their information elsewhere. Termed “data portability”, the ability to store information in a format which could be rendered simply and easily is the one key into the “Web of Data”. However, “Linked Data” is essential for such a web to exist.

There are several questions that must be answered:

    * What exactly is Linked Data and how does it fit into the Web of Data?
    * How do we develop and use Linked Data?
    * How do we deploy it, and get maximum efficiency from those links?
    * How do we avoid problems with data access and unambiguous naming?
    * How do we avoid problems with data reference and ambiguous association?
    * How does Linked Data relate to Data Space philosophy?