LAWDI 2013 Things to read

Linked Data, Tim Berners-Lee

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

This document is important for defining the 5 Gold Stars of Linked Data. It also belongs in the "Fundational Documents" below.

The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.

Linked Things, Tom Scott

http://derivadow.com/2010/07/01/linked-things/

“Now many people will tell you (indeed I probably will too) that you need to distinguish the statements you make about the thing in the real world from the statements about the document. For example, a URI for me might return a document with some information about me, but the creation date for that document and the creation date for me are two different things. And because you don’t want to get confused it’s better to have a URI for the thing and another one for the document making assertions about the thing. Make sense?”

Linking Things and Common Sense, Ed Summers

http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/07/07/linking-things-and-common-sense/

“I agree that the really interesting assertions in Linked Data are about things, and their relations...”

Give Me a Sign: What Do Things Mean on the Semantic Web?, Mike Bergman

http://www.mkbergman.com/994/give-me-a-sign-what-do-things-mean-on-the-semantic-web/

“Names, references, identity and meaning are not absolutes. They are not philosophically, and they are not in human language. To expect machine communications to hold to different standards and laws than human communications is naive. To effect machine communications our challenge is not to devise new rules, but to observe and apply the best rules and practices that human communications instruct.”

Using "Punning" to Answer httpRange-14, Jeni Tennison

http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/170

“Like the meaning of a word, the sense that a URI refers to is a social understanding which emerges from use of the URI across the web, and a given URI may be used to refer to different senses in different sources of information or over time. Consumers interpret the information that uses a URI and is made available to them on the web in order to draw conclusions and perform a task. Different consumers will have different levels of trust in the particular interpretation of the URI that a given publisher provides; in particular, the information published by the supplier of the URI might be given a higher weight than that from third-party publishers.”

Cool URIs for the Semantic Web, W3C - edited by Leo Sauermann and Richard Cyganiak

http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/

The state of the art, 2008.

Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space (1st edition), Tom Heath and Christian Bizer

http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/

The state of the art, 2011. Expands on the previous document with more discussion and examples.

A Short History of "Resource", Tim Berners-Lee

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TermResource.html

Anecdotes about the relationship of the term "Resource" to "Document" and "Thing" and a nice synopsis of the W3C TAG's HTTPrange-14 finding. HTTPrange-14 changed (or hijacked, depending on your POV) the HTTP spec to segregate non-information resources (things) from information resources (documents).