Linked Data Event Streams (LDES) is an initiative designed to help data publishers strike a balance between offering rich, queryable APIs and providing static data dumps. By proposing an event stream as the foundational API, LDES aims to make it as lightweight and straightforward as possible to host and maintain a dataset. 

An LDES is defined as a collection of immutable objects (members), each described in Resource Description Framework (RDF). It is based on the hypermedia TREE specification, which provides an alternative to one-dimensional HTTP pagination. Consumers can replicate the history of a dataset and efficiently synchronise with its latest changes, and can host one or more in-sync views on top of the default append-only view. 

LDES is fostered by SEMIC and has been officially adopted as a standard specification by the Flemish Government through the Flanders Smart Data Space project. It is used to publish data from various sources and domains (sensor networks, base registries, archives, cultural-heritage collections, etc.). 

The specification and associated data models are made available under the Creative Commons (CC BY), in line with the European Commission’s guidelines.