Demonstrating Linked (Open) Data Flow -- Dynamic Product Pricing & Offers Spreadsheet

Created on 2016-05-19 14:45

Published on 2016-05-19 15:52

Here's a spreadsheet generated from a SPARQL Query Results Document URL (format CSV) that demonstrates the power of Linked Open Data, in regards to dynamic construction of License Offers Pages via Google Spreadsheets:

Lite Edition ODBC Driver License Offers for various RDBMS products

 

 

Why is this important? 

I've embedded a spreadsheet in a LinkedIn post that places you a click-away from accessing its contents. Once in the spreadsheet, you are a cell-formula (in this case ImportData() ) lookup away from the SPARQL Query Results URL that acts as the Spreadsheets Data Source. 

You can simply paste the SPARQL Results URL into any Web Browser that supports "text/csv" content type and you will see a CSV data dump. If you seek an alternative representation of this data, simply change "text/csv" to "text/html" and an HTML version of the data in tabular form will be presented.

Most important of all, at every stage in the process, you have hyperlinks (HTTP URIs) functioning as Super Keys, so you are just a click away from a document that describes whatever the hyperlink identifies.

That's what Linked Open Data is all about. The unique power of HTTP URIs to enable:

  1. Entity Identification
  2. Entity Description -- using RDF Language Statements (i.e., subject, predicate, object based sentences/statements)
  3. Open Data Flow -- data is accessible to any HTTP client in a variety of negotiable document content formats.  

Once upon a time, this was the vision behind initiatives such as OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), CORBA, OpenDoc, etc. It took emergence and ubiquity of the platform agnostic HTTP protocol to make this a reality.

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