linked data

Linked data is a set of practices for publishing structured data on the web so that it can be interlinked with data from other sources and become more useful through those connections. The term and principles were articulated by Berners-Lee in 2006, building on the W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the broader vision of the semantic web.

The four principles of linked data are:

1. Use URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) to name things.
2. Use HTTP URIs so those names can be looked up.
3. Provide useful information (using standards like RDF) when someone looks up a URI.
4. Include links to other URIs so that people and machines can discover related things.

Linked data extends the web’s architecture of hyperlinked documents to hyperlinked data. Where a hyperlink connects one page to another without specifying the nature of the connection, linked data triples connect entities through typed relationships: a person authored a book, a city is located in a country, a chemical has property solubility.

Widely used linked data systems include Wikidata (the structured knowledge base behind Wikipedia), Schema.org (vocabulary for embedding structured data in web pages), and the Library of Congress’s BIBFRAME format for bibliographic records [@heath_LinkedData_2011].