Toward sustainable publishing and querying of distributed Linked Data archives

Purpose This paper details a low-cost, low-maintenance publishing strategy aimed at unlocking the value of Linked Data collections held by libraries, archives and museums. Design/methodology/approach The shortcomings of commonly used Linked Data publishing approaches are identified, and the current lack of substantial collections of Linked Data exposed by libraries, archives and museums is considered. To improve on the discussed status quo, a novel approach for publishing Linked Data is proposed and demonstrated by means of an archive of DBpedia versions, which is queried in combination with other Linked Data sources. Findings We show that our approach makes publishing Linked Data archives easy and affordable, and supports distributed querying without causing untenable load on the Linked Data sources. Practical implications The proposed approach significantly lowers the barrier for publishing, maintaining, and making Linked Data collections queryable. As such, it offers the potential to substantially grow the distributed network of queryable Linked Data sources. Because the approach supports querying without causing unacceptable load on the sources, the queryable interfaces are expected to be more reliable, allowing them to become integral building blocks of robust applications that leverage distributed Linked Data sources. Originality/value The novel publishing strategy significantly lowers the technical and financial barriers that libraries, archives and museums face when attempting to publish Linked Data collections. The proposed approach yields Linked Data sources that can reliably be queried, paving the way for applications that leverage distributed Linked Data sources through federated querying. *Corresponding author