Linked Data: Turning Stovepiped Data Into a Web of Data

Nick Gall — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:07:40 +0000

In talking with clients about SOA, WOA, and application integration generally, the conversation often turns to best practices for their IFaPs (Identifiers, Formats, and Protocols). First I always stress, as Tim Berners-Lee does, that of the three (I,F, and P) — Identifiers are by far the most important to information sharing. After all, the Web is fundamentally a web of LINKS!

After such conversations, I typical send a follow up email with some good examples of “linked data” and some pointers on versioning IFaPs — two of the most critical aspects of a successful information architecture IMO. Here is one such example…

Here are some links to the Linked Data initiatives I mentioned:

I forgot to mention one other pioneering effort in “linked data”: the use of XBRL by the FDIC et al and the SEC. XBRL.org just published the US GAAP Taxonomies in XBRL — a major achievement: http://xbrl.us/pages/us-gaap.aspx . The links on this page lead to a nice “taxonomy browser” that makes it (relatively) easy to navigate these complex taxonomies.

Finally, we only mentioned it in passing, but extensibility/versioning strategies for XML and other Web languages (e.g., HTML) is another poorly understood topic. I think people read the X in XML (meaning eXtensible) and believe (mistakenly) that XML is extensible by default. It is NOT. Here are some useful references into the leading thinking on this issue:

Nick Gall » extensibility

Linked Data: Turning Stovepiped Data Into a Web of Data