About LDkit

LDkit is Linked Data query toolkit for TypeScript developers.

LDkit lets you access, display and modify any RDF data, and it works in browser, Deno and Node. It is sort of an ORM for graph databases.

Typical use

The typical LDkit workflow to access Linked Data comprises of these protocols:

• You define a data source and other settings through Options.
• You define a Namespace for the data to be retrieved, or use an existing one.
• You define a data Schema with the help of namespaces.
• You create a data Lens and pass it the schema and options to query data.
• Optionally, you can tweak the Query Engine.

Motivation

This toolkit was created to address one prevailing issue within the world of Linked Data - it is challenging for frontend developers to create user facing apps, because retrieving RDF data from any source is a non-trivial task. You need to learn how to parse and process RDF data, or learn SPARQL query language to query graph-based data. And after you have the data, you need to figure out how to transform it to native format so that you can display it to the user. In short, you need to learn a lot of things to create a simple Hello, World Linked Data application.

Over the years there were several attempts to address this issue, but since most of the attempts came from academia, they are based on legacy technologies (mostly Java) that are not that useful for modern web. Simply put, the scientists have been trying to pioneer a pretty interesting technology, but were unable to reach target audience - application developers that could take advantage of Linked Data.