W3C Strategic Highlights: Strengthening the Core of the Web (Web of Data)

(This post is part of a series recapping the October 2018 W3C Strategic Highlights and does not include significant updates since that report.)

Data is increasingly important for all organizations, especially with the rise of IoT and Big Data. W3C has an extensive suite of standards relating to data that were developed over two decades of experience. These include core standards for RDF, the Semantic Web and Linked Data.

The JSON-LD Working Group has recently started to work on updating the JSON-LD specification which covers a JSON based serialization of RDF. This is assisting the W3C Work on the Web of Things which is seeking to use JSON-LD to describe things as objects with properties, actions and events, independently of the underlying protocols.

A W3C Workshop is being planned for early 2019, on emerging standardization opportunities, e.g. query languages for graph databases and improvements for handling link annotations (property graphs), different forms of reasoning that are suited to incomplete, uncertain and inconsistent knowledge, support for enterprise knowledge graphs, AI and Machine Learning, approaches for transforming data between different vocabularies with overlapping semantics, signed Linked Data Graphs, and work on improving W3C's role in respect to hosting work vocabularies and ontologies.

You can also see All Data specifications.