  The Web community has introduced a set of standards and technologies for
representing, querying, and manipulating a globally distributed data structure
known as the Web of Data. The proponents of the Web of Data envision much of
the world's data being interrelated and openly accessible to the general
public. This vision is analogous in many ways to the Web of Documents of common
knowledge, but instead of making documents and media openly accessible, the
focus is on making data openly accessible. In providing data for public use,
there has been a stimulated interest in a movement dubbed Open Data. Open Data
is analogous in many ways to the Open Source movement. However, instead of
focusing on software, Open Data is focused on the legal and licensing issues
around publicly exposed data. Together, various technological and legal tools
are laying the groundwork for the future of global-scale data management on the
Web. As of today, in its early form, the Web of Data hosts a variety of data
sets that include encyclopedic facts, drug and protein data, metadata on music,
books and scholarly articles, social network representations, geospatial
information, and many other types of information. The size and diversity of the
Web of Data is a demonstration of the flexibility of the underlying standards
and the overall feasibility of the project as a whole. The purpose of this
article is to provide a review of the technological underpinnings of the Web of
Data as well as some of the hurdles that need to be overcome if the Web of Data
is to emerge as the defacto medium for data representation, distribution, and
ultimately, processing.
