Linked Data and Enterprise Data Integration
What can linked data do for the enterprise, can it solve the CIO’s headaches around data integration problems? That topic comes up more and more often in the linked data community. Where does Linked Data fit into the enterprise? Let’s explore that by looking at conventional enterprise data integration first.
Search is about more than just the answer
In the space of Semantic Search we more often see attempts to build so called “answer machines”, like Wolfram Alpha. You specify your query as detailed as possible, and the service gives you the answer directly. I sometimes hear people say that this is the future of search. No, it is not.
uberblic.org launched
In early 2009 I had the idea for a linked data integration platform, capable of importing and mapping all of the publicly available data sets in the Linked Data cloud into a single repository, represented in a coherent ontology, reconciled and accessible through central APIs.
What started out as an idea a year ago now became reality. Today, we have released uberblic.org, a service for integrating the web of data.
The harm of “non-commercial”
Many data sources on the web are licensed under non-commercial licenses. There are understandable reasons for data publishers to choose non-commercial licensing: Their data might have been funded with tax money, or they license the content from other content creators under contracts that only allow non-commercial republishing.
DBpedia Ontology – designed to break?
One of the bigger changes of the upcoming DBpedia 3.4 release is the ontology’s new URI schema: Property URIs are now partitioned by the property’s domain. While before it was http://dbpedia.org/ontology/artitect, now it is http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Building/artitect. In the past, there’s been the statement that http://dbpedia.org/ontology/architect has the rdfs:domain http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Building, now this fact is in addition also coded into the URI.
Looks ok? Maybe on the first sight. But in my opinion, it’s a big mistake.
