Connecting Services to the Web of Data

Over the last few years we have seen a rapid growth in the Web of Data where now statistics indicate that there are around 100 billion semantic statements available on the Web. Governments, especially the US and UK Governments, are producing hundreds of thousands of public datasets in machine readable form on the Web using Web standards such as RDF(S) and SPARQL. Major Web and Media players such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft and the BBC are now using this technology. In this talk I will describe work that we have been carrying out in the area which we term "Linked Services" which seeks to connect the spheres of Linked Data and Web services to form a new global computing platform. I will illustrate the talk with a number of applications we have been involved.