It’s All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web.

In the discussion over yesterday’s post, a few people tweeted that the U.K. government’s public data websiteData.gov.uk is mostly populated with ‘Open Data‘ and not ‘Linked Data.’ But what does that mean? It means that much of the data on the site is available to the public, but it doesn’t link to other data sources on the Web. It could be data that has been uploaded in CSV format (i.e. spreadsheet data), whichSir Tim Berners-Lee said in an interview with me last year is a common occurrence with government departments. Or it could be data in another non-Web format.

Screen froma Tim Berners-Lee presentation on Linked Data, circa 2008

Titti Cimmino put it nicely: Open Data is simply ‘data on the web,’ whereas Linked Data is a ‘web of data.

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