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Linked Data Working Group

A working group of the Digital Scholarship and Scholarly Communications Office of the Vanderbilt Heard Libraries.

Linked Data Working Group

Welcome to the homepage of the Linked Data Working Group at Vanderbilt. Our group meets weekly during the academic year and is sponsored by the Digital Scholarship and Scholarly Communications Office of the Jean & Alexander Heard Libraries.

graph diagram
Diagram from http://linkeddata.org/ (CC BY-SA)

What’s Linked Data?

Linked Data is a way to model data as a graph of interconnected resources. Visually, you can imagine it as a collection of interconnected bubbles connected by arrows. Each bubble represents a particular entity and the arrows represent the relationships between the entities. The classic concept of Linked Data imagines a machine-readable analog of the web where data from many different sources can be discovered and combined to create a dataset that is greater than what could be assembled by any individual.

There are many approaches to using Linked Data. Some of them, like RDF, JSON-LD, and the SPARQL query language are W3C standards. Other tools like neo4j and its associated query language Cypher are not part of any standard, but are also widely used. The Sementic Web is effectively an extension of Linked Data that allows computers to compute new knowledge by combining information from multiple sources. Linked Data underpins the popular Wikidata data source and Linked Data can be used to commuincate more clearly to search engines the important details about a web page or site.

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a subset of Linked Data where data are freely available for reuse. In this group, we will try to support LOD as much as possible!

About the group

Anyone who is interested in Linked Data, graph databases, the Semantic Web, JSON-LD, or any other related topic is welcome to attend. We also would love to have remote participants from outside Vanderbilt. If you are interested in remoting in, or if you have any questions about the group, contact Steve Baskauf.

Venue

Our group meets on most Mondays from 12:10 to 1:00 PM in the Training Room in the basement of the Eskind Biomedical Library (Room 010). Click here to view the schedule for the current semester.