Representing Linked Data as Virtual File Systems

One of the main characteristics of Linked Open Data (LOD) is the exclusive application of standards published and maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium. This strict adherence is kept on all levels, ranging from the identification and transportation (URI, HTTP) to the interpretation (RDF, RDFS, OWL) of resource descriptions. Because these standards are open and accessible to everybody, broad acceptance and proliferation of LOD technologies in Web-based applications and services are enabled. On typical desktops, however, the majority of applications are not aware of Web standards, but use hierarchical file systems to organize and store information. This results in a gap between the two distinct information spaces of the Web and the desktop. To bridge this gap, we propose a virtual file system representation of LOD sets, through which they can be accessed as if they were present in the file system and thus easily be used within desktop applications.