Tom’s Travels is a quick and dirty demonstration of how easy it is to build quick and dirty mashups using Linked Data and PHP. The application takes as input a list of DBpedia URIs of some places I’ve happened to visit on my travels. When a visitor chooses one of the listed places, the app retrieves an RDF description of that place by dereferencing the DBpedia URIs, and then follows onward links in the RDF to other data sources (such as Geonames and the FlickrWrappr), demonstrating the follow your nose principle that is central to Linked Data. The retrieved data is merged into one unified description of the place, and this is rendered in HTML. The app is written in about 700 lines of PHP (which includes custom code for caching of image data) on top of ARC and Moriarty. Some of the anomolies, such as inconsistent population figures and seemingly irrelevant images, demonstrate the challenges of developing apps on top of public Web data.
Athens, Georgia