You want to build a new application that shows the correspondence among economic growth, renewable energy consumption, mortality rates and public spending for education. You also want to improve user experience with mechanisms like faceted browsing. You can already do all of this today, but you probably won’t. Today’s measures for integrating information from different sources, otherwise known as mashing data, are often too time-consuming and too costly.
Although the idea of Linked Open Data (LOD) has yet to be recognised as mainstream (like the web we all know today), there are a lot of LOD already available. The so called LOD cloud covers more than an estimated 50 billion facts from many different domains like geography, media, biology, chemistry, economy, energy, etc. The data is of varying quality and most of it can also be re-used for commercial purposes.
The basic idea of a semantic web is to provide cost-efficient ways to publish information in distributed environments. To reduce costs when it comes to transferring information among systems, standards play the most crucial role. Either the transmitter or the receiver has to convert or map its data into a structure so it can be “understood” by the receiver.
(www.reeep.org)
