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Linked Data is a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data on the Semantic Web. The practice emphasizes Web access to data using existing Web technologies such as URIs and HTTP. It also emphasizes links between related Web resources.

Triplify provides a building block for the semantification of Web applications. Triplify is a small plugin for Web applications, which converts database content into RDF or JSON feeds and provides a Linked Data interface.

The Disco - Hyperdata Browser is a simple browser for navigating the Semantic Web as an unbound set of data sources. The browser renders all information, that it can find on the Semantic Web about a specific resource, as an HTML page. This resource description contains hyperlinks that allow you to navigate between resources. While you move from resource to resource, the browser dynamically retrieves information by dereferencing HTTP URIs and by following rdfs:seeAlso links.

The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data. Like the web of hypertext, the web of data is constructed with documents on the web. However, unlike the web of hypertext, where links are relationships anchors in hypertext documents written in HTML, for data they links between arbitrary things described by RDF,. The URIs identify any kind of object or concept. But for HTML or RDF, the same expectations apply to make the web grow: 1. Use URIs as names for things 2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names. 3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information. 4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

LODr is a RDF-based (re-)tagging service, that allows people to weave their Web 2.0 tagged data into the Linked Data Web and provides a dedicated browsing interface.

The primary success criteria for the next two days will be the publication of new vocabularies on the Web that increase the availability of Linked Data. That's the main goal, but there are many others. I am confident that this first VoCamp will be an opportunity to share issues, expertise, modeling techniques and design patterns. In doing so we will all become smarter. There is an opportunity to scope requirements in the wider Semantic Web field that impact upon the availability and reuse of vocabularies. Collectively we can identify missing pieces of the technical infrastructure required by the Web of Data, and begin to build a social infrastructure that helps us collectively ease the vocabulary bottleneck.

I hope that "Smarter" is going to be a key tag for the Web 3.0, and yet I think "More Open, More Ubiquitous, with even More Information (Overload) and a little Smarter" is what it's really going to be. We'll have to wait till "Web 4.0" for a web that really is stepwise more intelligent, one that could really be called semantic and hold the hidden promises of a "Semantic Web". And the reason I believe this is that the community is focused on linking more stuff together in new ways and breaking down data siloes, much more than it is focused on creating new, smarter filters for all the data that's going to be made accessible that way.

So far little awareness exists about the commercial opportunities of linked data. Andreas Blumauer (SWC) talked to Chris Bizer, mastermind behind the DB-Pedia project and advocate of the linking open data philosophy, about the emerging market for deep web applications, its value for corporate purposes, and the need for information accountability and privacy awareness.