The quantity of published Linked Data continues to increase. However, applications that exploit Linked Data are not yet widespread. Reasons may include a lack of suitable solutions for a number of open problems. The diversity and dynamics of LOD sources have brought new challenges in seamless data integration, dynamic discovery, provenance tracking, and quality assessment at the Web scale. Addressing these issues requires joint community efforts from both LOD provision and consumption perspectives, including the development and investigation of concepts that can lead towards the realisation of a sustainable Linked Data ecosystem. The objective of this workshop is to provide a focused venue for academic and industrial discussions on concepts, algorithms, infrastructure and tools (including systematic analysis and rigorous evaluation) that help to exploit Linked Data (and not just to produce it).


Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: July 12, 2013, 23.59 Hawaii time
Acceptance notification: August 9, 2013
Camera-ready versions of accepted papers: August 25, 2013
Workshop date: October 21, 2013


Objectives

The term Linked Data refers to a practice for publishing and interlinking structured data on the Web. Since the practice has been proposed in 2006, a grass-roots movement has started to publish and to interlink multiple open databases on the Web following the Linked Data principles. Due to conference workshops, tutorials, and general evangelism an increasing number of data publishers such as the BBC, Thomson Reuters, The New York Times, the Library of Congress, and the UK and US governments have adopted Linked Data principles. The ongoing effort resulted in bootstrapping the Web of Data which, today, comprises billions of RDF triples including millions of links between data sources. The published datasets include data about books, movies, music, radio and television programs, reviews, scientific publications, genes, proteins, medicine, and clinical trials, geographic locations, people, companies, statistical and census data, etc.

Access to Linked Data presents exciting opportunities for the next generation of Web-based applications: data from different providers can be aggregated and fragmentary information from multiple sources can be integrated to achieve a more comprehensive view. While a few applications, such as the BBC music guide have used Linked Data to significant benefit, the deployment methodology has been to harvest the data of interest from the Web to create a private, disconnected repository for each specific application. Such an approach can only be the beginning; new concepts to consume Linked Data are required in order to exploit the Web of Linked Data to its full potential. The concepts, patterns and tools necessary are very different from situations when resource identifiers are local or known a-priori, whole-repository queries are possible, access to the repository is reliable and relevant data sources are known to be trustworthy.

Several open issues that make the development of Linked Data based applications a challenging or still impossible task. These issues include the lack of approaches for seamless integration of Linked Data from multiple sources, for dynamic, on-the-fly discovery of available data, for information quality assessment, and for elaborate end user interfaces. These open issues can only be addressed appropriately when they are conceived as research problems that require the development and systematic investigation of novel approaches. The International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data (COLD) aims to provide a platform for the presentation and discussion of such approaches. Our main objective is to receive submissions that present scientific discussion (including systematic evaluation) of concepts and approaches, instead of exposition of features implemented in Linked Data based applications. For practical systems without formalization or evaluation we refer interested participants to other offerings at ISWC, such as the Semantic Web Challenge or the Demo Track. As such, we see our workshop as orthogonal to these events.


Topics of Interest

Relevant topics for COLD 2013 include but are not limited to:

Live Linked Data (i.e., algorithms and applications that make use of Linked Data at runtime)
Architectures for consuming Linked Data (e.g., Dataspaces, Cloud, NoSQL))
Handling additional web data (e.g., microformats, microdata, schema.org, APIs, JSON, Open Graph Protocol, Twitter Cards...)
Web scale data management (indexing, crawling, etc.)
Query processing over multiple linked datasets and/or endpoints
Search in the Web of Data
Auto-discovery of URIs and data
Caching and replication techniques
Dataset dynamics
Reasoning on Linked Data from multiple sources
Information quality and trustworthiness of Linked Data
User interface research for the interaction with the Web of Data
Integration of Linked Data sources
Novel languages for navigating and consuming Linked Data
Linked Data summarization, data-guides, schema learning
Sustainable Linked Data ecosystems for industrial/commercial settings