Challenges on Developing Tools for Exploiting Linked Open Data Cubes

Abstract

A major part of open data provided by international and governmental organizations include facts and figures that are described in a multi-dimensional manner (aka data cubes). The real value, however, of these open data cubes will unveil from combining and exploiting them in analytics across the Web. Linked data paradigm promises to facilitate the realization of this vision. The RDF data cube (QB) vocabulary, which enables modeling multidimensional data as RDF graphs, is a major step towards this direction. Based on the QB vocabulary a number of data cubes are provided as linked data either by the owners of the data or by third parties. However, existing linked open data cubes do not facilitate the development of generically applicable tools that could use data from different sources. The aim of this paper is to present challenges related to the development of software tools that combine and exploit linked open data cubes in analytics and visualizations. These challenges have been emerged during the development of the OpenCube suite of tools that support the whole linked data cube lifecycle. We anticipate that the identified challenges will enable publishing linked data cubes of high quality.