Implementing Web and Mobile Applications From Linked Open Data

1. Introduction

Data on the web often consists of isolated silos that cannot exchange information with each other due to incompatibility among the various online data formats. Many researchers, including (Bizer et al., 2011; Wood et al., 2014; Ziegler et al., 2021), think that the Linked Data initiative will make structured data available and easily accessible over the Internet through a set of standards and tools. The linked Open Data (LOD) movement encourages the use of principles, standard web technologies, and semantic web technologies to publish data in a machine-readable format, linked to each other, forming a searchable giant global knowledge graph. Through semantic web technologies, conceptual models that underlie visible data become semantically explicit and transparent. They provide data integration for dynamic and distributed systems, such as large enterprises and National Government Organizations (Devogele, 2018; Mountantonakis and Tzitzikas, 2019; Farghaly et al., 2019). Exchange of Data is possible with a standard data format, such as Resource Description Framework¹ (RDF), and a standard method for accessing it, such as Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language² (SPARQL). Both Linked Data technologies are World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations.

Linked data principles and initiatives have gained wide adoption (Sakr et al., 2018; Raza et al., 2019; Lnenicka and Komarkova, 2019). The linked data use on the web is enhanced when there is no restriction, i.e., linked open data. The use of linked open data, including government data (Attard et al., 2016; Flores, 2020), has continued to grow rapidly and massively throughout the past few years. Additionally, they have expressed great interest in various fields, including government, health, agriculture, energy, and education. Consequently, adding value to government-linked open data can improve collaboration between public organizations and the public sector. The Linked Data movement has highlighted the need to provide tools and strategies for publishing and accessing data on the web.

Several web platforms are hosting linked open data and applications developed from this Data, such as https://www.data.gov/applications. The platforms demonstrate that citizens are interested in exploiting linked data to develop services that benefit them (Braşoveanu et al., 2017; Meherhera et al., 2021). A map of citizens' employability across American states and sectors of activity is an example of this type of application. This will enable a targeted and efficient job search. An example of energy consumption during the day can be seen in the time slot of the energy consumption of household members during the day. This can give an impression of the efforts for energy saving.

There is a need to develop public applications (Rao and Nayak, 2017; Pace et al., 2018; Wirtz et al., 2019); web and mobile applications belonging to several domains to fully exploit the vast amount of linked open data available over the web. However, to the best of our knowledge, no method for open linked data applications development and publication is provided in the literature.

Therefore, we are interested in taking advantage of existing applications that use linked open data and the tools and technologies to exploit and manage this type of data. This paper has three goals: (1) to benchmark linked open data applications, (2) to propose an approach that uses linked open data as input and produces useful web and mobile applications, and (3) to test and evaluate generated applications from a performance perspective.

Hence, the following questions are addressed by this work:

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  How can linked open Data be easily consumed?

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  How can linked open datasets be used to create applications?

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  How should these applications be published to make them open and shareable?