This article describes how Linked Open Data (LOD), under the umbrella of the Semantic Web, integrates the openly-published semantic information making it easily understandable and consumable by humans and machines. Currently, researchers have applied the principles of LOD in several domains including e-government, media, publications, geography, and life sciences. Besides the fast pace of research, the field is still an emerging one, where researchers face several prominent challenges and issues that need to resolve to exploit LOD to its fullest. In this article, the authors have identified challenges, issues, and research opportunities in the publishing, management, linking, and consumption of LOD. The research work presented here will grab the attention of researchers and may aid to the current state-of-the-art in this area.
BioFed: federated query processing over life sciences linked open data