Best Practice and Examples
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Wherever possible, the OpenEI Glossary features related terms and definitions collected from other sources. This is made possible by the Linked Data services provided by other agencies such as DBPedia and reegle. OpenEI obtains this information through RDF or SPARQL endpoints in real time, ensuring that the information provided to the user is always current.
All talking about the same thing Providing this additional information strengthens users’ understanding of the defined terms while semantically linking the resources to a central concept. The result is a machine-readable relationship among multiple data sources. This relationship allows machines to automatically determine the term associated with each definition and is essential in collecting the appropriate definitions for a specific term. In the case of OpenEI Definitions, this is achieved using a semantic property called foaf:page. Because OpenEI, DBPedia, and reegle all refer to the same Wikipedia article as a page discussing the same topic, OpenEI is able to automatically generate the SPARQL necessary to fetch definitions from each of the other sites. In short, by semantically linking the OpenEI definition to a central concept (the Wikipedia page), the developers gain easy access to all other information linked to that same concept.
Linked Open Data: The Essentials