What is 5 Star Linked Data?
As Internet based applications evolve, a new array of specifications are being developed and deployed. The idea is that internet users will be able to develop new ‘semantic’, ‘internet aware’ functionality as easily or in a similar way to the use and evolution of HTML as the foundation for WWW.
An important aspect of these new specifications is the concept of using 5 Star Linked-Data. So what is it?
As part of the evolving WWW design issues “Architectural and philosophical points” documentation; Tim Berners-lee describes the concept of LinkedData. Critical to the design is the use of RDF.
TimBL Describes 5-Star Linked Data in the following way
| ★ | Available on the web (whatever format) but with an open licence, to be Open Data |
| ★★ | Available as machine-readable structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table) |
| ★★★ | as (2) plus non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV instead of excel) |
| ★★★★ | All the above plus, Use open standards from W3C (RDF and SPARQL) to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff |
| ★★★★★ | All the above, plus: Link your data to other people’s data to provide context |
SOURCE: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
The 5 ★ Open Data site provides some good additional information to get started in understanding 5-star Linked Data.
The starting point for any application developer is perhaps to start understanding RDF. Useful resources can be found on the Linked-Data Github Repository and important related works include the Read Write Web, WebID, and a list of other related communities can be found here.
