Open data standards boosting productivity and interoperability

Every website today is made available to two main audiences: People, and software agents. For a long time, these agents mainly were search engines, crawling the web to feed their search index. Today, a growing number of AI agents need to be addressed, making sure the information is not only found as a page through Google, but also as an answer in, let’s say, ChatGPT. And if you ask ChatGPT what needs to be done to publish in an AI-friendly way, it clearly says: “Use JSON-LD and Schema.org annotations to provide structured data” — so, in other words: Use Linked Data*.

Liip brings Entryscape to accelerate Swiss Linked Data publishing

Managing the creation and publication of high-quality linked data can be non-trivial indeed: Technology, process, data governance and culture challenges all come together, needing a comprehensive approach and state-of-the-art tools to ensure progress at the pace necessary.

One of the leading publishing tools in the Linked Data space is Entryscape. It is developed by MetaSolutions, a company owned by the Swedish Internet Foundation. Entryscape enables organisations all over Europe to collect, manage and visualise their data and dramatically accelerate their journey towards Linked Data. Together with Liip’s long-standing expertise in the Open Data space, both as engineers and consultants, Entryscape promises to change the Swiss data publishing landscape for good, making data publishers ready for the AI age.

Therefore, MetaSolutions and Liip have agreed on a partnership, making Liip the official Swiss Entryscape solutions provider and establishing a sustainable collaboration based on the open source ethos:

“We built EntryScape so anyone can create and manage open linked data with ease. We base our work on open standards and have already delivered many solutions to customers in Sweden and other European countries. This gives us a head start in Switzerland. We share values in openness and how to do business with Liip. That is a great foundation for a partnership as we develop new solutions together”. Eric Hjelmestam, MetaSolutions

The time for Linked Data is now

While the idea of Linked Data as means for smart web-based data publishing is not new, the confluence of two megatrends is accelerating the development right now: The rise of AI on one hand, and the adoption of Linked Data strategies by the public sector. While for a long time a classic “chicken and egg” situation was stalling progress — not much meaningful Linked Data was produced for a lack of consumers, and vice versa — now both sides are making massive steps forwards. Now is the right time to kick off a Linked Data publishing prototype.

About Linked Data

Linked data is about complementing the existing web of documents with a web of data. Linked data is about information about things, where things can be people, places, medicines, historical events, images, movies, text documents, etc. In concrete terms, it is enough to follow three principles:

  1. addressability - give each thing a URI (a web address) that allows claims to be retrieved via HTTP
  2. unified information model - use RDF (Resource Description Framework) to express claims about things
  3. linking - connecting things to each other through relationships of various kinds, preferably between different data sources.