Tom Heath, Christian Bizer – Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space:

“This book gives an overview of the principles of Linked Data as well as the Web of Data that has emerged through the application of these principles. The book discusses patterns for publishing Linked Data, describes deployed Linked Data applications and examines their architecture.”

The Web page contains the whole book, for free. I still dislike RDF triples, but there’s heaps of useful information.

I especially like this one:

“Linked Data commits itself to a specific pattern of using the HTTP protocol. This agreement allows data sources to be accessed using generic data browsers and enables the complete data space to be crawled by search engines. In contrast, Web APIs are accessed using different proprietary interfaces.”

Each big corporation’s information silo uses their own API. That’s crazy. If you don’t want to be open to the public, prevent access by requiring authentication. But don’t force developers to reimplement simple data access (search, read). I’m currently in favor of HTML with semantic markup (probably RDFa)…