Linked Open Data: a short introduction

The World Wide Web was conceived as a means of social interaction to share knowledge, and developed initially as a "Web of Documents", creating "islands of information". Now the Web is evolving towards a "Web of Data", in which machines can perform connection between the resources available on the web, thanks to the technological infrastructure of the Semantic Web. The basic technology is RDF (Resource Description Framework) which implements a totally decentralized mechanism to describe the relationships between the resources available on the Web. Therefore RDF allows you to publish data on the Web, making them available for remote queries, possibly involving data sources distributed on various sites, thus implementing the paradigm of Linked Open Data at its highest level. But the real glue of the Semantic Web are ontologies, designed as a formal representation of reality and knowledge representation mechanism in a distributed environment. The seminar will outline briefly the basic technologies of the Semantic Web and the principles of Linked Open Data.