Introducing Jekyll RDF

Template-Based Linked Data Publication
with Minimized Effort and Maximum Scalability

Natanael Arndt
<https://natanael.arndt.xyz/#i>

ISKO UK Meetup, London/Online

2024-11-19

Overview

  1. Motivation and Aim
  2. Approach
  3. Core
  4. Documentation and Test
  5. Use Cases and Community
  6. Future
  7. Questions

Motivation and Aim

The LOD Cloud

The Linked Open Data Cloud from lod-cloud.net

The Linked Open Data Cloud from lod-cloud.net

Aim

The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal not only that it should be useful for human–human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help users communicate with each other. Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J.: Publishing on the semantic web. Nature 410(6832) (2001)

Problem

How can we close the gap between structured data and human accessible exploration interfaces?

Generic Interfaces

Customized layouts as form letter for graph data

The Core Approach

Markup

From Resource to Page

Template Selection

Templates are selected based on the types shortest subClass-path

The Code

Integrated in Jekyll

  • Popular Jekyll system (6th on jamstack)
  • It is a Static Site Generator and CMS
  • Layout templates and markdown files to build a webpage
  • The webpage is static and self contained
  • … and can be served with minimum effort using e.g. nginx, github pages, static webspace
  • Powerful, extensible, and simple templating language (liquid)

Initial Creation

  • The foundation was laid by a student team as part of an assignment
  • With a student worker it was further developed
  • Part of the technology stack for my doctoral thesis
    • “Publication and Exploration”
    • plays nicely with Git based data workflows

Documentation and Test

Community and Usecases

Vocabulary Docu with JOD

JOD: Jekyll Ontology Documentation

At eccenca, the Leipzig University Library (UBL), and the German National Library (DNB).

https://github.com/eccenca/jod, diggr, gndo

Research Projects & Groups

Data Week

Future

Jinja and Python

  • Python re-implementation
  • Take the parts apart (starting with the markup)
  • Latex templates
  • Hybrid static and dynamic site generation

Summary

@github: https://github.com/AKSW/jekyll-rdf

Jekyll RDF: Template-Based Linked Data Publication with Minimized Effort and Maximum Scalability
by Natanael Arndt, Sebastian Zänker, Gezim Sejdiu, Sebastian Tramp
in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2019), Daejeon, South Korea, 2019-06