LOD2 Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data

Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for the Digital Agenda in Europe gave this week an opening speech to the OKFestival 2012 in HelsinkiHelsinki is the capital and largest city in Finland. It is in the southern part of Finland, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, by the Baltic Sea. The population of the city of Helsinki is 583,484 (31 December 2009), making it the most populous municipality in Finland by a wide margin. Helsinki ..., FinlandFinland, officially the Republic of Finland Finnish: Suomi; Swedish: Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden on the west, Norway on the north and Russia on the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland. ... – organised by the LOD2EU-funded (FP7) research project aiming to take the Web of Linked Data to the next level. Main research challenges: improve coherence and quality of data published on the Web, close the performance gap between relational and RDF data management, establish trust on the Linked Data Web and ... partner Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN).

Excerpt from the respective OKFN blog post: ‘Today Neelie gave a virtual address for participants at OKFestival, one of the largest open knowledge events to date. The event has convened over 800 open data, open content and open access advocates in Helsinki for six days of talks, workshops and hackathons. In her talk Neelie highlights the European Commission’s commitment to policies, projects and funding to support open data and open access, including for public sector information, cultural data, science and research. Her address closes with the following remarks: I know you at the OKFestival don’t need convincing about the benefits of openness, nor about the huge innovation that it can fuel. RestRepresentational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term Representational State Transfer (REST) was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation. Fielding is one of the ... assured, the EU is behind you.’

At the end of her speech she mentioned the LOD2 project as follows: ‘Fourth, we will of course continue to support research related to open data. Like the LOD2 project, using open source software to help people publish linked data.’

The LOD2 team is very happy about this reference!