Local Type Checking for Linked Data Consumers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new scripting language with a mixed static and dynamic type system designed for Web developers to build applications that consume Linked Data, addressing a gap in the development stack.

Contribution

It proposes a domain-specific scripting language with a tailored type system for Linked Data consumption, integrating static and dynamic typing for local and external data.

Findings

The language supports Web developers in building Linked Data applications.

Type system effectively handles local and external data sources.

Relates to W3C standards for accessible Linked Data development.

Abstract

The Web of Linked Data is the cumulation of over a decade of work by the Web standards community in their effort to make data more Web-like. We provide an introduction to the Web of Linked Data from the perspective of a Web developer that would like to build an application using Linked Data. We identify a weakness in the development stack as being a lack of domain specific scripting languages for designing background processes that consume Linked Data. To address this weakness, we design a scripting language with a simple but appropriate type system. In our proposed architecture some data is consumed from sources outside of the control of the system and some data is held locally. Stronger type assumptions can be made about the local data than external data, hence our type system mixes static and dynamic typing. Throughout, we relate our work to the W3C recommendations that drive Linked Data, so our syntax is accessible to Web developers.