LOD Laundromat: A Uniform Way of Publishing Other People’s Dirty Data

It is widely accepted that

proper

data publishing is difficult. The majority of Linked Open Data (LOD) does not meet even a core set of data publishing guidelines. Moreover, datasets that are

clean

at creation, can get

stains

over time. As a result, the LOD cloud now contains a high level of

dirty

data that is difficult for humans to clean and for machines to process.

Existing solutions for cleaning data (standards, guidelines, tools) are targeted towards human data creators, who can (and do) choose not to use them. This paper presents the LOD Laundromat which removes stains from data without any human intervention. This fully automated approach is able to make very large amounts of LOD more easily available for further processing

right now

.

LOD Laundromat is not a new dataset, but rather a uniform point of entry to a collection of cleaned siblings of existing datasets. It provides researchers and application developers a wealth of data that is guaranteed to conform to a specified set of best practices, thereby greatly improving the chance of data actually being (re)used.