ldow

LDOW, standing for Linked Data on the Web, refers to the practice of publishing, interlinking, and consuming structured data on the Web using Linked Data principles. It describes both the broader technical approach—RDF, URIs, vocabularies, and interlinking—and the related community activities, including a recurring workshop and track at the World Wide Web Conference (WWW). In published literature the abbreviation is typically LDOW; lowercase “ldow” may appear in casual usage or titles.

Core concepts include using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as globally unique identifiers for things, representing data in RDF or other interoperable formats, and linking datasets to create a global data graph. It emphasizes openness, licensing, data provenance, and quality, with common technologies such as RDF serializations (RDF/XML, Turtle, JSON-LD), SPARQL for querying, and established vocabularies and ontologies.

LDOW has enabled notable open data projects such as Wikidata, DBpedia, and various government and scientific datasets to interoperate and be discovered across domains. The field addresses challenges such as data quality, provenance, versioning, and licensing, and remains active in research on data integration, schema mapping, and scalable querying. The LDOW community continues to publish benchmarks, best practices, and case studies at WWW conferences and in related venues.