Why use LDS3?

The Linked-Data tool stack has been maturing over the last few years, however management of resources in Linked-Data providers is still an area of research. Many providers now allow data to be submitted and indexed in order to provide services on top of data and while LDS3 fits this area, it also explicitly defines how to version and store submitted documents.

Linked-Data has historically been about sharing "triples" of information relating to an object. This model, while simple, does not provide enough flexibility to find the history and provenance of each of these "triples". By expanding the model to include a fourth item, the "quad", such information can also be located. This fourth piece of information is often referred to as the graph or document that defines the data.

In order to take advantage of the versioning and provenance information provided by quads, LDS3 is explicit in the fact that users can only administer documents which provide data, and not the data itself. LDS3 defines a REST API to manage documents in a linked data system, enabling the simplistic publishing of complex datasets, providing a missing piece of the jigsaw of data publication.

Picture to demonstrate where LDS3 fits