Linked Data

Webs of documents are fabulous enough. Webs of data will blow your mind.

A table is a fixed structure. A tree is as well. A graph can go on forever and be extended at any time by anyone.

The Web is an unbounded graph. It is our definition of scale. What happens when we start to use it as the basis of sharing information, not just documents. This does not necessarily mean the public Web (although it is certainly appropriate for that as well). It simply means thinking of information as a web of linked entities through discoverable relationships.

Linked data is a way of doing this, but it is also an established project connecting billions of entities from disparate, unrelated sources. How does that even work? What can you do with such a thing? And what does that mean for your organization?

By building on the ideas introduced in the Data Integration talk, we will explore how webs of data built on standards can change everything.

About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

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