How it works

This is a brief overview to some of the underlying technical concepts of uberblic.org.

Linked Data is a method of exposing, sharing, and connecting data via dereferenceable URIs on the Web. It uses web technologies and parts of the semantic web technology stack to expose structured data in a way that it can be more easily re-used and re-combined by application developers and machines. One of its main technical rules is to assign HTTP URIs to all objects of interest, like people, places, or companies, and to provide structured data in the RDF format for each of these things.

Schema Harmonization describes the first of multiple processing steps towards consolidated data. It enables users to transform data sources into a common data model and data format.

Identifier Consolidation is the process of combining different names (identifiers) for equivalent objects. Whenever the same real-world entity is being described in different data sources, like one particular book that exists in two separate databases, these sources tend to use their own identifiers for the what is the same real-world entity, due to a lack of coordination in distributed systems. Identifier consolidation enables data users to handle co-references, unify identifiers, and prepares data objects to be merged.

Data Consolidation combines information from different sources about equivalent entities. Methods of data fusion can help to complement otherwise missing facts or to reconcile and validate facts using multiple sources about the same object. Data consolidation also enables to create new meaningful relations between objects that would otherwise be impossible to identify in separate data sources.