What is the 5 star web? Well as Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the web, explains in this video– the next big thing on the web is the semantic web and 2011 is the year when it will really take off.

He has assigned a 5 star scheme to assess how well web content is suited for what he calls the semantic web. This is the idea that our content is published on the web in a way that it can be used by websites, apps (through the software which runs them) to present our content together with related information from others. Essentially we need to publish data which is machine readable and becomes part of the growing web of linked data.

To see what is involved in making more IFPRI data available in this form, we have taken the Global Hunger Index (GHI) as an example and published it as linked data RDF files and documented the experience. This is the first stage of the project as we make the data available and then monitor its use and look at ways to promote and integrate it with more datasets.

The GHI 2010 data is made available as linked data (modeled in SCOVO and an RDF Data Cube multi-measure model) at http://data.ifpri.org/rdf/ghi/.

The complete range of IFPRI datasets can be found on IFPRI’s collection on dataverse and through the datasets section on the IFPRI website.

This work was inspired by the iKMemergent project which now has a discussion group discussing linked data at http://dgroups.org/groups/LinkInfo4Dev. They have produced an interesting discussion note following their workshop in London.