What is LDE?

LDE (Linked Data Elements) is an open-source toolkit of composable building blocks for working with Linked Data in Node.js. It covers the full Linked Data lifecycle – from discovery and ingestion through transformation to publication.

Every organization working with Linked Data ends up building the same infrastructure from scratch: endpoint management, data import, transformation pipelines, dataset discovery. LDE provides those pieces as small packages that you compose into your own applications and pipelines.

Ready to try it? Head to Build a pipeline.

Design principles

SPARQL-native. Data transformations are expressed as plain SPARQL queries: portable, transparent, testable, version-controlled and free of vendor lock-in. TypeScript handles only the parts that are hard to express in SPARQL alone.

Composable. Each package does one thing; the interfaces between them (selectors, resolvers, readers, writers, validators, reporters) are small and pluggable, so you can swap any part for your own implementation.

Bounded memory. LDE processes data it cannot hold. Memory is always bounded by a configured unit of work (batchSize, capacity, …), never by the size of the input – see ADR 12.

Standards-based. DCAT-AP 3.0 for discovery, SPARQL 1.1 for transformation, SHACL for validation, VoID for statistics, RDF/JS as the internal data model – see the standards reference.

How the documentation is organized

• The Guide opens with introduction pages like this one, core concepts and the architecture; then come two hands-on tutorials – build a pipeline and build a search API – and goal-oriented how-to recipes for specific tasks.
• The Reference describes the packages, the standards they implement, and the architecture decision records documenting each significant design choice and its rationale.