Linked Data uptake. Linked Data is a universal approach for… | by Ivo Velitchkov | Medium
Linked Data is a universal approach for naming, shaping, and giving meaning to data, using open standards. It was meant to be the second big information revolution after the world wide web. It was supposed to complement the web of documents with the web of data so that humans and machines can use the Internet as if it is a single database while enjoying the benefits of decentralisation.
Today on the web we have 1495 lin ked open datasets, according to the LOD cloud collection. Some among them like Uniprot and Wikidata are really big in volume, usage, and impact. But that number also means that today, 15 years after the advent of Linked Data, LOD datasets are less than 0.005% of all publicly known datasets. And even if we add to that the number the growing amount of structured data encoded as JSON-LD and RDFa in the HTML, the large majority of published data is still not available in a self-descriptive format and is not linked.
That’s in the open web. Inside enterprises, we keep wasting billions attempting to integrate data and pay the accumulated technical debt, only to find ourselves with new creditors. We bridge silos with bridges that turn into new silos, ever more expensive. The use of new technologies makes the new solutions appear different and that helps us forget that similar approaches in the past failed to bring lasting improvement. We keep developing information systems that are not open to changes. Now we build digital twins, still using hyper-local identifiers, so they are more like lifeless dolls.
