Publishing linked open data from spreadsheets

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW), as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is “the universe of network-accessible information, the embodiment of human knowledge”1. With development over the years, the global web of linked documents has become the global web of linked data, which is popularly known as the “semantic web”. The semantic web is now an established topic of research but there remain many unanswered questions. Data that are linked and open facilitate discovery and reuse. Likewise, vocabularies used to describe the semantic relationships amongst linked and open data facilitate discovery and reuse. Yet, it is not always a straightforward matter to take data that may be somehow accessible on a webpage written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and publish it as Linked Open Data (LOD). Many complimentary technologies are used in handling Linked Open Data (LOD) on the web, particularly the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and the Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL), to name a few. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for a global hypertext system continues to be fulfilled. This thesis work contributes to the practice of publishing Linked Open Data (LOD) by following the lifecycle of a particular dataset from spreadsheet to Linked Open Data (LOD) that is accessible on the web. As such, this thesis can serve as a guide for researchers and citizens-at-large who want to contribute their data to the world. It talks about the methodology that can be used to describe a linked open vocabulary to map survey data from a spreadsheet file. 1. https://www.w3.org/WWW/