Linked Data

A bit of background to why I started to write articles, if you are not interested in that story jump to the next section. Yesterday I started to explore topics for my master thesis, I have a strong web background, thereby I decided that I want to do something in that area. The first obvious choice was to create something utilizing machine learning to provide more insight into existing data. For years this has always been a goal for me as I was drafting ideas for interactive schoolbooks, notebooks, collaboration tools and so on. All these ideas somehow didn’t work out because I was missing something. Yesterday I finally found out what I was missing. It was so obvious but it needed this spark to light the fire. That spark for me was the deep dive into Linked Data and the concept of datapods introduced by Solid. Linked Data describes a standard that allows machines to make meaning of a text. So if I would for example write a sentence like — “London is the capital of England” — you immediately know what London, capital and England means. A machine doesn’t have that knowledge and can do nothing “intelligent” with that sentence. With linked data the sentence would contain annotations and hints that tell a machine more about the entities and what they are. So they would basically point the machine to more information about the entities and their relationships. This might sound lame, why should I be interested that a machine can understand what I’m writing? Well, I was thinking the same at the beginning but then I imagined a schoolbook where I read and can hover certain words and immediately get more details about that entity. If we take the same sentence as mentioned earlier I would hover London and the document could fetch a database on some web server and tell me that there are currently 8,13 million inhabitants. Or that London city spans over an area of 1572km². These are just simple examples but they will give you an idea what could be possible. For example in the future I could write a article about London that includes statistical data, but instead of writing the numbers as text I could just add a hint to the document to fetch the currently accurate number from an online source. Linked data also makes it possible to query documents for information, that means we can just ask the document to give us what we want instead of reading through countless pages. In the next part I will take a look at the concept of datapods and how I think it will shape the future of the web.