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This software is a prototype - it is not guaranteed to be bug free and should not be used for critical tasks.

LD-Explorer is a tool that aims to put an end to the blockers and confusion around the use of RDF and Linked Data. Often, developers will discover the techniques on the way to meeting requirements like data interoperability or model flexibility, and then be put off by the steep and mostly academic-focussed learning curve and the lack of any tools that let you just "try it out".

The hope is that this tool reduces the learning curve and enables discussion around the use of linked data to happen more easily.

The Pitch

The idea of Linked Data has been around for almost 20 years. It solves a number of key problems around the consumption, analysis and interoperability of disparate data. The principles are built on the premise that anyone could say anything about anything, meaning the approach is great for situations where you have lots of data coming from lots of different places and you want to ask questions across all of it.

Unfortunately, the over-commoditisation of data over the years has leaned the software industry towards being rather selfish with how we share data, and at worst disincentivising organisations from making their data interoperable. Often, data is simply exposed via an API with little or no thought being given to how that data might be used or the challenges that may be faced by anyone wishing to work with it, with the data provider believing their responsibilities to have ended as soon as the data has been made available. Any consumer who plans to federate queries across multiple data sources now has the unenviable task of wiring all of that data together through either manual methods or by writing brittle scripts, a challenge they will need to re-visit every time a new data source is introduced.

Whilst linked data does somewhat solve this problem, it has unfortunately been sidelined as an approach to the point where it is considered fairly niche and we see it used very little in modern commercial software development. This has led to an apparent software drought and a lack of accessible resources for anyone wishing to learn and explore the validity of using linked data principles for their own use cases.

• It makes linked data and its associated ecosystem difficult to learn for newcomers and those who "learn by doing". On the other side of the coin, it makes it difficult for experts to demonstrate and teach linked data principles to others.
• It makes exploring the use of linked data too unobtainable for most people.
• It makes it hard to demonstrate the value that linked data could provide, creating friction between experts and those who they need to sell these approaches to.
• For developers, it provides a working example of how to create a linked-data app with modern frontend tooling.

LD-Explorer aims to solve all of these problems. In reality, there is some great software out there for working with knowledge graphs and linked data, it's just that most of it is not exposed in a way that makes it easy to pick up and use for most people. LD-Explorer aims to solve this by putting an intuitive user interface in front of some of the best linked-data libraries in the world, exposing their power directly within a web browser.

The tool is aimed at both experts and newcomers alike. It can be used as a study aid for people wishing to learn about linked data techniques, but also as a mechanism for experts to finally be able to demonstrate these approaches in practice without having to create development environments or stand up databases.

LD-Explorer has been created to address what we see as several very real problems with regards to the use of Linked Data and Knowledge Graphs in production systems. The developers of this tool consider the lack of accessible tooling, the difficulty enthusiasts and experts have in easily demonstrating and explaining these techniques and the overly-academic/overly-technical nature of the available resources to be major blockers in communicating the value of linked data to the masses. This tool has been created to address all of these issues.