RDF for the Masses

While the semantic web has been around for over twenty years, practical and sustainable implementations have been thin on the ground. During 2024, DDI Controlled Vocabularies and the DDI-CDI ontology have been made available, for the first time, as persistently resolvable linked open data. This presentation digs into the underlying cloud infrastructure, the rationale for creating it and some practical guidance on how to get the most out of the resources now available. We will detail how to use a triple store like Apache Fuseki as the primary storage layer for making RDF data available, and why you should avoid trying to do this with SQL. As well as technical challenges, we’ll also explore some of the organisational challenges we faced creating an RDF data pipeline from CESSDA (where the CVs are created and edited), to the DDI Alliance platform, where both HTML and RDF data are made available, and how to achieve this seamlessly using HTTP content negotiation.