Brian McBride, Original developer of Jena, the Java semantic web library

This is the first of two talks about Linked Open Data and the semantic web. In this talk I will work through some examples using the Jena Open Source Java library to publish data on the web and exploit published data. The main focus will be on working code and I will introduce just enough of the principles, languages and standards of Linked Open Data to explain how the code works. The following talk will build on this one, going into more depth on practical applications of the Semantic Web modeling languages used in Linked Open Data, other technologies that can be used to build Linked Open Data applications and discuss applications in Health Care and Life Sciences.

The talk begins with a couple of motivating examples, one from within a large enterprise and another from the education sector of government. I will explain the principles behind the Linked Open Data approach, describe the RDF data model, and then will get onto working through the example applications. We will look at ingesting data from a other formats into RDF and using the Jena rules language to transform that data into its published form. We will look at the problems that arise linking data from multiple sources and solutions to those problems. We will cover deployment of the data on the web and then examine an application that exploits the data. Along the way, I’ll introduce the RDF data model, explain the architecture and facilities of the Jena library, and show how to use the SPARQL Query Language for querying LOD.