The quantity of published Linked Data is increasing dramatically. However, applications that consume Linked Data are not yet widespread. Current approaches lack methods for seamless integration of Linked Data from multiple sources, dynamic discovery of available data and data sources, provenance and information quality assessment, application development environments, and appropriate end user interfaces. Addressing these issues requires well-founded research, including the development and investigation of concepts that can be applied in systems which consume Linked Data from the Web. Following the success of the 1st International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data, we organize the second edition of this workshop in order to provide a platform for discussion and work on these open research problems. The main objective is to provide a venue for scientific discourse — including systematic analysis and rigorous evaluation — of concepts, algorithms and approaches for consuming Linked Data.
The term Linked Data refers to a practice for publishing and interlinking structured data on the Web. Since the practice has been proposed in 2006, a grass-roots movement has started to publish and to interlink multiple open databases on the Web following the Linked Data principles. Due to conference workshops, tutorials, and general evangelism an increasing number of data publishers such as the BBC, Thomson Reuters, The New York Times, the Library of Congress, and the UK and US governments have adopted Linked Data principles. The ongoing effort resulted in bootstrapping the Web of Data which, today, comprises billions of RDF triples including millions of links between data sources. The published datasets include data about books, movies, music, radio and television programs, reviews, scientific publications, genes, proteins, medicine, and clinical trials, geographic locations, people, companies, statistical and census data, etc.
Access to Linked Data presents exciting opportunities for the next generation of Web-based applications: data from different providers can be aggregated and fragmentary information from multiple sources can be integrated to achieve a more comprehensive view. While a few applications, such as the BBC music guide have used Linked Data to significant benefit, the deployment methodology has been to harvest the data of interest from the Web to create a private, disconnected repository for each specific application. Such an approach can only be the beginning; new concepts to consume Linked Data are required in order to exploit the Web of Linked Data to its full potential. The concepts, patterns and tools necessary are very different from situations when resource identifiers are local or known a-priori, whole-repository queries are possible, access to the repository is reliable and relevant data sources are known to be trustworthy.
Several open issues that make the development of Linked Data based applications a challenging or still impossible task. These issues include the lack of approaches for seamless integration of Linked Data from multiple sources, for dynamic, on-the-fly discovery of available data, for information quality assessment, and for elaborate end user interfaces. These open issues can only be addressed appropriately when they are conceived as research problems that require the development and systematic investigation of novel approaches. The International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data (COLD) aims to provide a platform for the presentation and discussion of such approaches. Our main objective is to receive submissions that present scientific discussion (including systematic evaluation) of concepts and approaches, instead of exposition of features implemented in Linked Data based applications. For practical systems without formalization or evaluation we refer interested participants to other offerings at ISWC, such as the Semantic Web Challenge or the Demo Track. As such, we see our workshop as orthogonal to these events.
Abstract: The incidents that Fire Fighters are being dispatched to are by nature unpredictable. This means that their information demand will change from occasion to occasion and timely as well. Netage.nl started developing and deploying small scale Semantic Technology based solutions at Fire Department Amsterdam-Amstelland. The agile nature of the Semantic Web allowed to create simple solutions to answer the questions that were really asked by the operational personnel. Today more than 15 Fire Stations in the greater Amsterdam area use real time Linked Open Data to supply their Fire Fighters with information. Started with small operational questions, development is slowly moving towards meeting the national paradigm shift on public fire safety. This endeavor has not been unnoticed and resulted in national and international partnerships to promote and implement the ideas outside Amsterdam as well.
Bio: Bart van Leeuwen has been the owner of netage.nl for 16 years. He has a lot of experience in "outside the box" thinking to help his customers get to the right solution. For Bart, technology is never the answer to business questions. Technology is an enabler, and should be treated as such. He has a lot of experience with Data management solutions like Lotus Notes, DB2, Postgres and their integration tools. Bart is also a professional fire fighter at Fire-department Amsterdam-Amstelland where his field experience combined with technological background resulted in ground breaking innovations on operational information delivery.
Querying
Dataset Analysis
Authentication and Licenses
Linked Data Applications
Abstract: The New York Times committment to Linked Data began over 160 years ago. Starting in 1851, The New York Times has always catalogued its archival articles using a controlled vocabulary of people, places, organizations and descriptors. In 2009 The New York Times started publishing this vocabulary as linked data using semantic web standards. In 2011 The Times announced the launch of several RESTful Semantic APIs. And in late 2012 and early 2013, The Times will migrate its entire process for vocabulary management to a system designed around the principles of Linked Data. In my remarks, I will survey the history of Semantic publishing at The New York Times, outline our semantic strategy, detail the business-case for linked data at The Times and provide an in-depth explanation of our new vocabulary management system.
Bio: Evan Sandhaus is The Lead Architect for Semantic Platforms at The New York Times Company. In his six years with The Times, Mr. Sandhaus has directed strategy and technology for The New York Times Linked Open Data Initiative; developed a semantic technology for identifying key concepts in large text datasets; engineered a patented system for purging template text from Web content; and collaborated with The Linguistic Data Consortium to release and promote The New York Times Annotated Corpus, a collection of 1.8 million richly annotated Times articles published from 1987
Vocabularies
Relevant topics for COLD 2012 include but are not limited to:
We seek novel technical research papers in the context of consuming Linked Data with a length of up to 12 pages.
Paper submissions must be formatted in the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).
Please submit your paper via EasyChair at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cold2012
Submissions that do not comply with the formatting of LNCS or that exceed the page limit will be rejected without review.
We note that the author list does not need to be anonymized, as we do not have a double-blind review process in place.
Submissions will be peer reviewed by three independent reviewers. Accepted papers have to be presented at the workshop proceedings.
The workshop proceedings are online as CEUR-WS.org Vol-905.
The workshop will be co-located with the 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in Boston, USA, and will be held on November, 2012.
The workshop will also consist of:
For further information about the workshop, please contact the workshops chairs at cold.org.ws@googlemail.com
COLD 2012 is the third edition of the Consuming Linked Data workshop series. The second edition was COLD 2011, and the second one COLD 2010.
The workshop is partly supported by the PlanetData project.