Linked data API

Linked data is a great way to represent information on the web, each thing (e.g. school, road, government department) is identified by a URI and if you GET that URI you are returned a machine readable description of it. When you want to query across this data, to find all things matching some pattern, then you have the power of SPARQL as a query language. However, for use in lightweight web applications this can be inconvenient. SPARQL and RDF have quite high learning curves and RDF support in the common web development tool stacks is a little patchy. Our solution to this is the linked data API.

The linked data API provides an easy to use web interface onto linked data. In particular, it allows a publisher to provide URIs for lists of things, for example all schools in the country or all open secondary schools in Oxfordshire. The API allows users to get back the data as JSON or simple uniform XML as well as RDF, it makes it easy to filter data using simple URL query parameters. Together this makes it easy to create web applications over the published data using standard tools. The API design is the result of a cross-organization collaboration between Epimorphics, Talis and The Stationery Office under the sponsorship of John Sheridan of The National Archive.

The LDA specification is fully open for anyone to implement. Epimorphics support an open source Java implementation of the API - Elda.

For more information contact us.