Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV): a gateway to reusable semantic vocabularies on the Web

One of the major barriers to the deployment of Linked Data is the difficulty that data publishers have in determining which vocabularies to use to describe the semantics of data. This system report describes the Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV), a high quality catalogue of reusable vocabularies for the description of data on the Web. The LOV initiative gathers and makes visible indicators that have not been previously been harvested such as interconnection between vocabularies, version history, maintenance policy, along with past and current referent (individual or organization). The LOV goes beyond existing Semantic Web search engines and takes into consideration the value's property type, matched with a query, to improve terms scoring. By providing an extensive range of data access methods (SPARQL endpoint, API, data dump or UI), we try to facilitate the reuse of well-documented vocabularies in the linked data ecosystem. We conclude that the adoption in many applications and methods of the LOV shows the benefits of such a set of vocabularies and related features to aid the design and publication of data on the Web.