This is cross posted at The Scholars’ Lab Blog.

Yesterday, I was fortunate to be invited by Andrew Stauffer and Bethany Nowviskie to present at their Rare Book School course, Digitizing the Historical Record. I talked about Linked Open Data (LOD), and afterward, Dana Wheeles talked about the NINES project and how they use RDF and LOD.

I tried to present a gentle, mostly non-technical introduction to LOD, with an example of it in action. Hopefully, this posting will be a 50,000 foot overview also.

The Linked Open Data Universe

Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/

The first thing to know about LOD is that it’s everywhere. Look at the Linked Open Data cloud diagram above. All of these institutions are publishing data that anyone can use, and their data references others’ data also.