Yikes! I've just discovered that the final part of the semanticweb.com's interview with Jim Hendler and I, includes critical paragraphs that omit my example links :-( As you can imagine, this is a quite excruciating, bearing in mind that "Literals" are of marginal value in a Linked Data world.
Anyway, thanks to the Blogosphere, I can attempt to fix this problem myself -- via this post :-)
Q. If you wanted to provide a bewildered but still curious novice a public example of Linked Data at work in their everyday life, what would it be?
Kingsley Idehen: Any one of the following:
My Linking Open Data community Profile Page - the Linked Data integration is exposed via the "Explore Data" Tab
My Linked Data Space - viewed via OpenLink's AJAR (Asynchronous Javascript and RDF) based Linked Data Brower
My Events Calendar Tag Cloud - a Linked Data view of my Calendar Space using an RDF-aware browser
In all cases, you have the ability to explore my data spaces by simply clicking on the links, which on the surface appear to be standard hypertext links, although in reality you are dealing with hyperdata links (i.e., links to entities that result in the generation of entity description pages that expose entity properties via hyperdata links). Thus, you have a single page that describes me in a very rich way since it encompasses all data associated with me, covering: personal profile, blog posts, bookmarks, tag clouds, social networks etc.
Q. What would you show the CEO or CTO of a company outside the tech industry?
Kingsley Idehen: A link to the Entity ALFKI, from the popular Northwind Database associated with Microsoft Access and SQL Server database installations. This particular link exposes a typical enterprise data space (orders, customers, employees, suppliers ...) in a single page. The hyperdata links represent intricate data relationships common to most business systems that will ultimately seek to repurpose existing legacy data sources and SOA services as Linked Data. Alternatively, I would show the same links via the Zitgist Data Viewer (another Linked Data-aware browser). In both cases, I am exploiting direct access to entities via HTTP due to the protocols incorporation into the Data Source Naming scheme.