ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the main principles of Linked Data, as originally set out by Tim Berners-Lee, and discusses how to design a Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model based on the structure of current Geographic Information. There are a number of commercially available and open source tools for storing and publishing linked data. It explains Berners-Lee’s Linked Data Principles, in particular the importance of making Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) dereferenceable. Now that Merea Maps knows where its URIs is coming from, there are several ways of generating the actual RDF data. The choice depends both on what the input data is like and how the RDF is to be accessed on the Web. There are four main ways in which the data may originally be structured: plaintext, structured data, such as comma-separated files, or spreadsheets, data stored in relational databases and data exposed via an Application Programming Interface.
