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.