Jooned

Jooned is a decentralized, open-source data platform designed to enable interlinked datasets across organizational boundaries. It emphasizes a graph-first data model, supports distributed storage, and provides tools for ingestion, normalization, linking, and querying of heterogeneous data.

The platform uses a modular architecture in which data sources produce triples or quad-like records, which are then normalized into a common schema. A built-in linker component creates semantic connections between entities across datasets, enabling unified queries. Jooned offers its own query language, JQL, inspired by SPARQL, and also provides compatibility layers for standard RDF queries. Data can be stored in local, edge, or cloud nodes, with an option for cryptographic integrity checks and optional replication to improve resilience.

Historically, Jooned was proposed by a group of researchers and practitioners in open data and semantic web communities in the mid-2010s. The first stable release appeared in 2018, followed by several major updates that expanded interoperability with existing graph databases and data catalogs. The project is maintained by a community governance model, with a core developer team and contributor guidelines. Licensing has varied over time, but current releases are distributed under an Open Source license approved by major OSI bodies.

Usage of Jooned spans universities, cultural heritage projects, and government data portals seeking to publish and explore interconnected datasets. Typical applications include cross-domain search, provenance tracking, and data federation. Limitations include the complexity of setup, performance considerations for very large graphs, and the need for careful data modeling to avoid ambiguous links.

Related technologies include RDF, SPARQL, graph databases, and linked data standards.