Some interesting stats from the book:
The LOD cloud has doubled in size every 10 months since 2007 and currently consists of
more than 300 datasets from various domains
All of this data is available for use by developers!
Some quick facts regarding the LOD cloud are:
As of late 2011, the LOD cloud contained over 295 datasets from various domains,
such as geography, media, government, life science, and more. In total the LOD cloud
contained over 31 billion data items and some 500 million links between them.
The LOD cloud has grown so large that no attempt was made to visualize it in 2012.
Over 40% of the Linked Data in the LOD cloud is contributed by governments (mainly
from the UK and US), followed by geographical data (22%) and data from the Life
Science domain (almost 10%).
Life sciences (including some large pharmaceutical companies) contribute over 50% of
the links between data sets. Publication data (from books, journals, etc.) come in
second with 19% and the media domain (the BBC, the New York Times, and others)
provides another 12%.
The original data owners themselves publish one third of the data contained in the
LOD cloud, while third parties publish 67%. For example, many universities republish
data from their respective governments in Linked Data formats, often cleaning and
enhancing data descriptions in the process.