LOD2 Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data

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 ... consortium is happy to announce the first release of the LOD2 stack available at: http://stack.lod2.eu. The LOD2 stack is an integrated distribution of aligned tools which support the life-cycle of Linked Data from extraction, authoring/creation over enrichment, interlinking, fusing to visualization and maintenance. The stack comprises new and substantially extended existing tools from the LOD2 partners and third parties.

The LOD2 stack is organized as a Debian package repository making the tool stack easy to install on any Debian-based system (e.g. Ubuntu). A quick look at the stack and its components is available via the online demo at: http://demo.lod2.eu/lod2demo. For more thorough experimentation a virtual machine image (VMware or VirtualBox) with pre-installed LOD2 Stack can be downloaded from: http://stack.lod2.eu/VirtualMachines/. More details and the instructions on installing the LOD2 Stack from scratch are available in the HOWTO Start document. The first release of the LOD2 stack contains the following components (available as Debian packages):

• LOD2 demonstrator, the root package (LOD2)
• Virtuoso, RDF storage and data management platform (Openlink)
• OntoWikiSemantic Wiki providing support for agile, distributed knowledge engineering scenarios. OntoWiki facilitates the visual presentation of a knowledge base as an information map, with different views on instance data. It enables intuitive authoring of semantic content, with an inline editing mode ..., semantic data wiki authoring tool (ULEI)
• SigmaEE, multi-source exploration tool (DERICentre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established in 2003 with funding from the Science Foundation Ireland. The vision of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute is to be recognised as one of the leading international web science research institutes interlinking technologies, ...)
• D2RD2R Server is a tool for publishing relational databases on the Semantic Web. It enables RDF and HTML browsers to navigate the content of the database, and allows applications to query the database using the SPARQL query language. (, RDF wrapper for SQL databases (FUB)
• SilkThe Silk framework is a tool for discovering relationships between data items within different Linked Data sources. Data publishers can use Silk to set RDF links from their data sources to other data sources on the Web. (, interlinking engine (FUB)
• OREThe ORE (Ontology Repair and Enrichment) tool allows for knowledge engineers to improve an OWL ontology by fixing inconsistencies and making suggestions for adding further axioms to it. (http://ore-tool.net/Projects/ORE), ontology, an ontology is a formal representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the entities within that domain, and may be used to describe the domain. In theory, an ontology is a "formal, explicit ... repair and enrichment toolkit (ULEI)

As online services were integrated into the LOD2 Stack: PoolPartyWeb based ontology manager which can serve as a central hub for your knowledge organization. With PoolParty you can organize and maintain knowledge models based on widely accepted specifications like RDF, SPARQL and SKOS. (taxonomyTaxonomy is the practice and science of classification. The word finds its roots in the Greek τάξις, taxis (meaning 'order' or 'arrangement') and νόμος, nomos (meaning 'law' or 'science'). Taxonomy uses taxonomic units, known as taxa. In addition, the word is also used as a count noun: ... manager by SWCG) and Spotlight (annotating texts w.r.t. DBpediaDBpedia is a project aiming to extract structured information from the information created as part of the Wikipedia project. This structured information is then made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to query relationships and properties associated with Wikipedia resources, ... by FUB). The LOD2 Stack also makes use of dataset metadata repositories such as thedatahub.org and http://publicdata.eu. A selection of the datasets has been packaged and are available in the LOD2 stack repository.

The LOD2 stack is an open platform for Linked Data components. We are happy to welcome new components. Detailed instructions how to integrate your component into the LOD2 Stack as Debian package are available in the HOWTO Contribute. For assistance or any questions related to the LOD2-stack contact support-stack@lod2.eu. From now on we will regularly release improved and extended versions of the LOD2 Stack. Major releases are expected for Fall 2012 and 2013.