Business value creation from Linked Data analytics: The LinDA approach

Given the existence of a wide set of available data sources nowadays, the production of advanced and meaningful business analytics is considered of high importance by many SMEs and large companies, since it provides them the capacity to gain insight in future trends and proceed to better decision making. However, several challenges exist, relevant to the need for management of structured and unstructured data in multiple formats, distributed in heterogeneous data sources and in many cases not well-maintained. Many of these challenges can be handled through the creation of Linked Data, a set of best practices for representing structured information on the web. Linked Data techniques facilitate the interconnection of related distributed data sources and thus make them available for further analysis. In this paper, an approach for the extraction of Linked Data analytics is presented, based on the exploitation of a set of tools for proper transformation and interlinking of public and private datasets and the realization of analysis over them. The proposed approach targets at enhancing the ability of public and private sector organizations to provide usable Linked Data, while offering SMEs the opportunity to perform advanced algorithmic analysis.