A Semantic Platform for Developing Data-Intensive Mobile Apps

Mobile devices have become the primary method of communication and information access for people around the world. Currently, most mobile applications create or consume data stored in standalone databases. This means most of these applications exist in silos without exploiting the potential of being linked with data collected from other applications or external data on the Web. The Web community has advocated the use of Linked Data technologies to address this issue for data interoperability on Web-based applications. Although we have seen some success from Web content publishers in using or publishing Linked Data, there are few examples to be found on mobile platforms. Our platform, developed as an extension of MIT App Inventor, bridges this gap by enabling developers to build mobile applications that can take advantage of Linked Data. The platform includes components for querying remote SPARQL endpoints, generating and storing triples from input and context, as well as enable crowd-sourcing of Linked Data through cloud based messaging. We believe that our platform will reduce the burden on mobile developers working with Linked Data and open up many opportunities for building mobile applications that interact with and contribute to the Linked Data world.