I have usually assumed that people reading this blog already know what RDF is. After recent discussions with people coming to RDF from the Linked (Open) Data and Knowledge Graph worlds, I realized that it would be useful to have a simple explanation that I could point to. This builds on material from the first three minutes of my video SPARQL in 11 Minutes.

At a recent W3C Government Linked Data Working Group working group meeting, I started thinking more about the role in linked data of laws that are published online. To summarize, you don’t want to publish the laws themselves as triples, because they’re a bad fit for the triples data model, but as online resources relevant to a lot of issues out there, they make an excellent set of resources to point to, although you may not always get the granularity you want.

I’ve managed to fill a key gap in the world’s supply of Linked Open Data by publishing triples that connect Mad Magazine film parody titles to the DBpedia URIs of the actual films. For example:

While preparing slides for the Semantic Web Overview talk I’ll be giving at the beginning of the Semantic Technologies course of the Oxford XML Summer School, I was adding a few slides on Linked Data. (Leigh Dodds is presenting a more detailed class on Linked Data later in the day.) Of course I had to include a slide of Richard Cyganiak’s interactive diagram of the Linked Data cloud, and as with many of my slides, I was tempted to re-use a slide from a presentation I’d given…

I’ve known for a while about ways to dig into the vocabularies used in DBpedia’s massive collection of triples, and I’ve used terms from these vocabularies to query for information such as Bart Simpson blackboard messages and US presidents’ ages at inauguration. I saw these terms as “field” names to use when querying this body of data.

After writing a few paid articles and doing a lot of blogging about various issues, features, and trends surrounding the Semantic Web, Linked Data, RDF, RDFa, SPARQL, OWL, and related tools and implementations, I thought it would be nice if I could tie them together into something resembling a cohesive whole. So, I wrote a short essay titled RDF, The Semantic Web, and Linked Data with over 70 footnote links to these various pieces. It will be a handy reference for me in the future, and I hope it…

Although he doesn’t describe it in linked data terms, a recent posting from Dean Allemang has some great suggestions for how to dive into a set of SPARQL-accessible data you know nothing about in order to find out what’s there. If there’s cool stuff in the data set, this is a lot of fun. (Also check out the recent Talking with Talis with Dean, where he describes many examples of semantic web technology helping large organizations solve very real problems.)

Anyone who follows the XML or semantic web world knows of Uche Ogbuji’s work. His presentation Linked Data: The Real Web 2.0. will be one of the first talks on the first day of the Linked Data Planet conference next week; as we prepare for it, I asked him a few questions about his work with Linked Data and the benefits its brought to clients of his company, Zepheira.