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The WWW2008 Conference has published some great material, in particular the papers from the Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2008) Workshop.

The Workshop Introduction is an easy to read summary of the development of Linked Data and the Linking Open Data Project over the past year. It includes the Linking Open Data “cloud” diagram which shows the relationships between the main currently available datasets. A good way to get a feel for the amount and scope of available Linked Data is to open each of dataset in its own tab in Firefox and look across the spectrum of data presented.

The home page of the Linking Open Data Project also lists recent developments such as new datasets, tools, publications and conferences becoming available. Conferences in the near future include the Linked Data Planet Conference in New York in June, and the I-Semantics 2008 in Austria in September. I-Semantics 2008 includes the LOD Triplification Challenge for show casing applications which demonstrate the benefits of linked data to end users.

DBpedia Mobile: A Location-Enabled Linked Data Browser provides an overview of DBpedia Mobile, a location-centric DBpedia client application for mobile devices. “The DBpedia project extracts structured information from Wikipedia and publishes this information as Linked Data on the Web. The DBpedia datasets contain information for about 2.18 million things, including almost 300,000 geographic locations. DBpedia is interlinked with various other location-related datasets. Based on the current GPS position of a mobile device, DBpedia Mobile renders a map indicating nearby locations from the DBpedia dataset. Starting from this map, users can explore background information about locations and can navigate into interlinked datasets. DBpedia Mobile demonstrates that the DBpedia dataset can serve as a useful starting point to explore the Geospatial SemanticWeb using a mobile device.”

There are a couple of options for trying out DBpedia Mobile from your browser including Viewing based on IP Address.

For getting up to speed with RDF, OWL and SPARQL, the technologies that form the basis of Linked Data, a good tutorial just published is Understanding SPARQL.