Abstract
Over the past 3 years, the Semantic Web activity has gained momentum with the widespread publishing of structured data as RDF. The Linked Data paradigm has therefore evolved from a practical research idea into a very promising candidate for addressing one of the biggest challenges in the area of the Semantic Web vision: the exploitation of the Web as a platform for data and information integration. To translate this initial success into a world-scale reality, a number of research challenges need to be addressed: the performance gap between relational and RDF data management has to be closed, coherence and quality of data published on the Web have to be improved, provenance and trust on the Linked Data Web must be established and generally the entrance barrier for data publishers and users has to be lowered. In this vision statement we discuss these challenges and argue, that research approaches tackling these challenges should be integrated into a mutual refinement cycle. We also present two crucial use-cases for the widespread adoption of Linked Data.