Toward sustainable publishing and querying of distributed Linked Data archives

Abstract

This paper details a low-cost, low-maintenance publishing strategy aimed at unlocking the value of Linked Data collections held by libraries, archives and museums. Design/methodology/approach The shortcomings of commonly used Linked Data publishing approaches are identified, and the current lack of substantial collections of Linked Data exposed by libraries, archives and museums is considered. To improve on the discussed status quo, a novel approach for publishing Linked Data is proposed and demonstrated by means of an archive of DBpedia versions, which is queried in combination with other Linked Data sources. Findings We show that our approach makes publishing Linked Data archives easy and affordable, and supports distributed querying without causing untenable load on the Linked Data sources. Practical implications The proposed approach significantly lowers the barrier for publishing, maintaining, and making Linked Data collections queryable. As such, it offers the potential to substantially grow the distributed network of queryable Linked Data sources. Because the approach supports querying without causing unacceptable load on the sources, the queryable interfaces are expected to be more reliable, allowing them to become integral building blocks of robust applications that leverage distributed Linked Data sources. Originality/value The novel publishing strategy significantly lowers the technical and financial barriers that libraries, archives and museums face when attempting to publish Linked Data collections. The proposed approach yields Linked Data sources that can reliably be queried, paving the way for applications that leverage distributed Linked Data sources through federated querying. * Corresponding author 2014). In a recent survey conducted by OCLC Research (Smith-Yoshimura, 2014), 96 participants identified 172 Linked Data projects or services being implemented. Of the 76 that were actually described, 67% published Linked Data. These project mostly aimed at bibliographic metadata enrichment, data interlinking, source referencing, unifying data from various sources, and enhancing existing applications. Meanwhile, the size of some available datasets already ranges between tens of millions and billions of triples. Prominent examples include WorldCat.org (15 billion), Europeana (4 billion), The European Library (2 billion), Library of Congress (500 million) and the British Library (100 million). Efforts are currently ongoing in a wide range of domains (Mitchell, 2015), including electronic thesis and dissertations (ETD) (Mak et al.

Metadata Aggregation via Linked Data: Results of the Europeana Common Culture Project

“…Solutions have been proposed by others for aggregation of LD (for example [6]) that tried to tackle the issue with generic solutions. None of the work in this area resulted in a standardized approach, however, and we could not find any sustainable application within cultural heritage.…”

DBpedia Archivo: A Web-Scale Interface for Ontology Archiving Under Consumer-Oriented Aspects

“…The Internet Archive provides a prominent service, Way-backMachine, 2 a generic archive for web resources (including a subset of ontologies from the web) accessible using Memento. Moreover, Memento is used and adapted by the TailR system [11], a self-deploy/service archiving system for Linked Data resources and the Triple Pattern Fragment Server which can be used to serve and query archived Linked Data [21] with lower infrastructural efforts. Unfortunately, Memento is currently not (widely) adopted for ontology publication and to the best of our knowledge, there is no support for Memento in ontology tools, yet.…”

Aggregation of Linked Data in the Cultural Heritage Domain: A Case Study in the Europeana Network

“…Solutions have been proposed by others for aggregation of linked data (for example [19]) that tried to tackle the issue with generic solutions. None of the work in this area resulted in a standardized approach, however, and we could not find any sustainable application within cultural heritage.…”