SPARQL on the Open, Decentralised Web

This dissertation discusses a broad range of problems concerning the use of the SPARQL query language on the open, publicWeb. It is motivated from seeing decentralisation of data and infrastructure as an important social goal, and SPARQL as an enabling technology to solve problems using the Semantic Web. The dissertation makes contributions in hypermedia, where RDF is used to create a format that can tell humans and machines alike how to manipulate resources on the Web; philosophy of science, where important foundational problems around how to create valid knowledge and objectivity are discussed; statistical methods that better satisfies the requirements from philosophy of science than current practice; how to improve developer efficiency with novel programming paradigms; and finally how caching infrastructure in the Internet may be used to make query answering across the Web more robust