Glossary

Technical terms found on this site.

Terms

The Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship site contains extensive introductory material, resources, and a full glossary of terms related to Linked Open Data.

Class: A collection of individuals or individual objects.

Contextual triples: Contextual triples are a way to introduce context and provenance into triples to represent more complex, nuanced information.

Entity: A discrete thing, often described as the subject and object (or the domain and range) of a triple (subject-predicate-object).

Instance: An instance is a specific, concrete object or individual that belongs to a class or concept defined within an ontology.

Linked data: Structured data that is linked with other data through the web and builds upon standard web technologies to share machine-readable data between computers. Read more.

Ontology: An abstract, machine-readable model of a phenomenon that captures and structures knowledge of entities, properties, and relationships in a domain so a conceptualization can be shared with and reused by others. Read more.

Persistent Identifier (PID): A persistent identifier is a long-lasting digital code that uniquely identifies entities, such as people, places, or texts.

Property: A specified relationship between two classes or entities, such as the predicate in a triple (subject-predicate-object). Read more.

Relationship: A relationship defines how entities are interconnected within an ontology.

Resource Description Framework (RDF): A standard for Linked Data (LD) that represents information in a series of three-part “statements” called a triple, which comprises a subject, predicate, and an object in the form subject-predicate-object. Read more.

Schema: A schema is a formal description of the structure of data.

Semi-structured data: Data where there is some structure but not in a way that makes it easy to extract entities and relationships without manual work. Read more.

Simple triples: Simple triples include a subject, a predicate, and an object without context.

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML): The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents.

Structured data: Data that takes the form of spreadsheets, relational databases, JSON files, RDF files, and XML files. Read more.

Tagset: A tagset is a collection of tags.

Triple: A statement in the form of subject-predicate-object that follows the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Read more.

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): A URI is a unique string of characters that identifies a resource on a computer network. URIs are used to identify anything described using the RDF.

Unstructured data: Data where there is no structure, meaning there is not a pre-defined data model or the information is not organized in a pre-defined way.

Vocabulary: A collection of terms that could be concretely described in an ontology, taxonomy, or thesaurus. Read more.

XML: A human- and machine-readable markup language that allows users to create their own tags to describe documents. Read more.