Transmute Tech School 101: Linked Data Enables Integration Across Systems
What is Linked Data?
Linked Data provides meaning to existing data, allowing systems to integrate without additional human interpretation.
How Linked Data turns Messages into Data
A well-designed system — one that is developer-friendly with an intuitive integration process — still requires a significant amount of interpretation to map itself to another organization. Even though the terms used should overlap, the subtle differences in names or definitions creates an integration challenge.
Linked Data addresses these differences, avoiding costly and error-prone manual interpretation.
“The term Linked Data is used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting information on the Web using standards, such as URLs, to identify things and their properties. When information is presented as Linked Data, other related information can be easily discovered and new information can be easily linked to it. Linked Data is extensible in a decentralized way, greatly reducing barriers to large scale integration.” — W3C Data Integrity/Linked Data Signatures
How Transmute uses Linked Data — JSON-LD
An Application Programming Interface (“API”) is a way to let one system programmatically communicate with another system. Most modern APIs are based on exchanging messages encoded in a developer-friendly syntax called JavaScript Object Notation (“JSON”).
“JSON-LD” overlays raw JSON data with Linked Data, providing context to understand the data without additional interpretation. JSON-LD adds Linked Data elements to existing API messages without altering any of the existing JSON itself. This means that Linked Data and all its value can be added without making changes to the original system.
Transmute’s Verifiable Data Platform and open source tools are all based on Linked Data. We express Linked Data as Verifiable Credentials which can be continuously verified in a decentralized way, or a “Trust-Less Architecture.”
Transmute holds editor roles on essential open source Linked Data projects including:
- UN/CEFACT semantic vocabulary
- W3C Traceability Vocabulary
- W3C Decentralized Identifiers Specification
- Verifiable Credentials v2.0 Specification
Linked Data Enables Integration — But Wait, There’s More!
Proactively embracing Linked Data provides a major business benefit in systems integration. Linked Data removes the cost and risk of interpreting what a counterpart system is attempting to communicate.
The benefits of Linked Data go beyond easing the burden of integration, though. Linked Data provides the raw material for establishing Knowledge Graphs, which can reveal hidden value deep within the data and unlock the ability for a business to make accurate data-driven decisions. Stay tuned for our next Tech 101 piece, where we go deeper into the elements of Transmute’s open source standards-based technology.
About Transmute: Building on the security and freedom that Web3 promised, Transmute provides all the benefits of decentralization to enterprise teams seeking a cost effective, interoperable, planet-forward experience provided by experts in technology and industry.
Transmute was founded in 2017, graduated from TechStars Austin in 2018, and is based in sunny Austin, Texas. Learn more about us at: http://www.transmute.industries
