These are exciting times, isn’t it? Every day new activities around Linked Data are reported.

All this happens at a rate, which can be overwhelming. Hence I think one should from time to time step back and have a chilled look at where we are concerning consumption of Linked Data. In the following I try to sum up a (rather high-level) view on the current state of the art and highlight ongoing challenges:

As you can see, the more we get away from the data (discovery, access) and move into the direction of information, the fewer available solutions are there. From an application perspective aiming at exploiting Linked Data, the integrated, cleaned, information is of value, not the raw, distributed and dirty (interlinked) RDF pieces out there. In my experience, most of the consolidation and nurturing is still done on the application-level in an ad-hoc manner. There is plenty of room for frameworks and infrastructure to supply this functionality.

No matter if you’re a start-up, a first-year student or a CIO in an established company – have a look at the challenges and remember: now is the right time to come up with solutions. You and the Web will benefit from it.

UPDATE: I originally had ‘Nurture’ as a label for this (*) task, however due to multiple requests I changed it to ‘Curation’ (IMO a bit of a Germanism, but, alas …). Secondly, thanks to another comment I updated the examples for the ‘Discovery’ task with Sindice and SPARQL Service Description.