FactForge: A fast track to the Web of data

The advent of Linked Open Data has seen a large number of structured datasets from various domains made available to the public. These datasets are seen as a key enabler for the Semantic Web, where applications can consume and combine this data in powerful and meaningful ways. However, the uptake of Linked Data during this 'introductory phase' is hampered in ways similar to the uptake of any new technology - until the technology has found widespread use, the range of opportunities for exploiting it is limited and until the opportunities are fully explored, the uptake of the technology is restricted. FactForge is a free, publicly available service that provides an easy point of entry for would-be consumers of Linked Data. This Web application is based on OWLIM, a high performance semantic repository that offers outstanding RDF data management and reasoning capabilities based on OWL. The data-exploration functionality provided by FactForge exploits the advanced features of OWLIM to allow users to combine SPARQL with various full-text search and ranking functions for powerful, user-guided data-mining over a number of the most popular LOD datasets. This paper gives an overview of FactForge, its many unique capabilities and its role within the emerging trend for the exploitation of Linked Open Data using OWL-based inference.