Making the Web a data washing machine

Over the past 3 years, the semantic web activ- ity has gained momentum with the widespread publishing of structured data as RDF. The Linked Data paradigm has therefore evolved from a practical research idea into a very promising candidate for addressing one of the biggest chal- lenges in the area of the Semantic Web vision: the exploita- tion of the Web as a platform for data and information inte- gration. To translate this initial success into a world-scale re- ality, a number of research challenges need to be addressed: the performance gap between relational and RDF data man- agement has to be closed, coherence and quality of data pub- lished on the Web have to be improved, provenance and trust on the Linked Data Web must be established and generally the entrance barrier for data publishers and users has to be lowered. In this vision statement we discuss these challenges and argue, that research approaches tackling these challenges should be integrated into a mutual refinement cycle. We also present two crucial use-cases for the widespread adoption of linked data.