balloon aims at offering public services and tools to take advantage of the semantic web with less effort. The basic motivation is to establish a foundation for Linked Data as a Service (LDaaS).
Today’s vision of a common Web of Data is mostly achieved and coined by the Linked Open Data movement. The first wave of this movement transformed silo-based portions of data into a plethora of open accessible and interlinked data sets. The community itself provided guidelines (e.g., 5 ★ Open Data ) as well as open source tools to foster interactions with the Web of data. Harmonization between those data sets has been established at the modeling level with unified description schemes characterizing a formal syntax and common data semantic. Without doubt, Linked Open Data is the de-facto standard to publish and interlink distributed data sets in the Web commonly exposed in SPARQL endpoints. However, a convenient request considering the globally described data set is only possible with strong limitations. balloon wants to overcome this issue by providing a large choice of services to simplify utilizing the web of data for your projects. We think that Linked Data tools should be available as a service (LDaaS), to avoid high setup and integration costs and data duplication. Therefore all balloon services will be public available and don't need to be installed locally.
Index and unify co-reference, instance and inheritance information of Linked Data endpoints, generating a bird's-eye view on the data.
SPARQL rewriting based on collected co-reference information (synonyms) combined with automatic endpoint discovery results in an intelligent query federation.
Exploit extracted structure to find shared characteristics of entitites and types. The range goes from simple type index up to data mining and inference
HTML & Javascript based RDF browser with information enhancement, offering an simple access to semantic information.
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