Linked Data Finland: Towards a 7-star Service Platform for Linked Datasets

The idea of opening data on the Web as Linked Data (LD) is widely adopted in areas such as public government, science, libraries, and cultural heritage. The key idea is to harmonize, integrate, enrich, and re-use existing data repositories in a cost-efficient way via standard APIs in novel applications. This paper concerns two major hindrances for re-using LD: It is often difficult for a re-user to understand the 1) characteristics of the dataset and 2) evaluate the quality of the data for her intended purpose. This paper introduces the “Linked Data Finland” publishing platform LDF.fi addressing these issues. In order to enhance and promote reusability, we propose extending the famous 5-star model of Tim Berners-Lee into a 7-star model: The sixth star requires that the dataset is defined and explained in terms of explicit schemas. Explicit schemas make it possible to explain the re-user the intended characteristics of the data by, e.g., documentation about the schemas, and how the schemas (vocabularies) are actually used in the given dataset. The seventh star is given, if the data has also been validated w.r.t. the schema specifications. The results of the validation may be a human readable document and/or a machine readable reprentation regarding the quality issues found in the data. This paper reports about work in progress, but the first prototype of the platform is already operational on the web as a service http://ldf.fi.