We have reached a beachead re. the Virtuoso instance hosting the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud; meaning, we are not going to be performing any major updates and deletions short-term, bar incorporation of fresh data sets from the Freebase and Bio2RDF projects (both communities a prepping new RDF data sets).
At the current time we have loaded 100% of all the very large data sets from the LOD Cloud. As result, we can start the process of exposing Linked Data virtues in a manner that's palatable to users, developers, and database professionals across the Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 spectrums.
What does this mean?
You can use the "Search & Find" or"URI Lookup" or SPARQL endpoint associated with the LOD cloud hosting instance to perform the following tasks:
- Find entities associated with full text search patterns -- Google Style, but with Entity & Text proximity Rank instead of Page Rank, since we are dealing with Entities rather than documents about entities
- Find and Lookup entities by Identifier (URI) -- which is helpful when locating URIs to use for identify entities in your own linked data spaces on the Web
- View entity descriptions via a variety of representation formats (HTML, RDFa, RDF/XML, N3, Turtle etc.)
- Determine uses of entity identifiers across the LOD cloud -- which helps you select preferred URIs based on usage statistics.
What does it offer Web 1.0 and 2.0 developers?
If you don't want to use the SPARQL based Web Service, or other Linked Data Web oriented APIs for interacting with the LOD cloud programmatically, you can simply use the powerful REST style Web Service that provides URL parameters for performing full text oriented "Search", entity oriented "Find" queries, and faceted navigation over the huge data corpus with results data returned in JSON and XML formats.
Next Steps:
Amazon have agreed to add all the LOD Cloud data sets to their existing public data sets collective. Thus, the data sets we are loading will be available in "raw data" (RDF) format on the public data sets page via Named Elastic Block Storage (EBS) Snapshots); meaning, you can make an EC2 AMI (e.g. a Linux, Windows, Solaris) and install an RDF quad or triple store of choice into your AMI, then simply load data from the LOD cloud based on your needs.
In addition to the above, we are also going to offer a Virtuoso 6.0 Cluster Edition based LOD Cloud AMI (as we've already done with DBpedia, MusicBrainz, NeuroCommons, and Bio2Rdf) that will enable you to simply instantiate a personal and service specific edition of Virtuoso with all the LOD data in place and fully tuned for performance and scalability; basically, you will simply press "Instantiate AMI" and a LOD cloud data space, in true Linked Data from, will be at your disposal within minutes (i.e. the time it takes the DB to start).
Work on the migration of the LOD data to EC2 starts this week. Thus, if you are interested in contributing an RDF based data set to the LOD cloud now is the time to get your archive links in place on the (see: ESW Wiki page for LOD Data Sets).