Making Your LInked Data Discoverable

All,

Over the years there has been a subtle "blind spot" re. Linked Data that 
ultimately leads to many a debate thread about Linked Data utility and 
applications etc.. Thus, I would like to outline a few simple best 
practices that would go a long way to putting these reoccurring issues 
to rest, once and for all.

Whenever you publish an (X)HTML based Linked Data interface please try 
to achieve at least one of the following:

1. Use Linked Data URIs in @href attribute of the <a/> tag associated 
with the literal values that typically label the subject, predicate, or 
object of an RDF triple.
2. Use the <link/> tag's @rel attribute to associate the (X)HTML 
document with Linked Data URIs of entities it describes or simply 
mentions (casually or topically).
3. If you have server access and admin level privileges, repeat #2 on 
the server side using the "Link:" header in HTTP responses .

Irrespective of how subjectively beautiful or ugly an (X)HTML interface 
might be re., Linked Data display, the utility of your Linked Data is 
ultimately comprised if it cannot be discovered, shared, and easily 
referenced to by other Linked Data tools.

Remember, this is all about webby structured data that leverages the RDF 
data model -- an entity relationship model endowed with explicit machine 
(and human) comprehensible entity relationship semantics :-)

Here's a simple example from DBpedia: http://bit.ly/10wXsXF .

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen
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LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen