16.10.2.Why is it Important?

A majority of the worlds data naturally resides in non RDF form at the current time. The Sponger delivers middleware that accelerates the bootstrap of the Semantic Data Web by generating RDF from non RDF data sources, unobtrusively. This "Swiss army knife" for on-the-fly Linked Data generation provides a bridge between the traditional Document Web and the Linked Data Web ("Data Web").

Sponging data from non-RDF Web sources and converting it to RDF exposes the data in a canonical form for querying and inference, and enables fast and easy construction of linked data driven mesh-ups as opposed to code driven Web 2.0 mash-ups.

The RDF extraction and instance data generation products that offer functionality demonstrated by the Sponger are also commonly referred to as RDFizers.