Linked data

A network of over a thousand circles clustered into groups and linked with lines into a web.
Wikidata in the Linked Open Data Cloud, as at August 2020. Databases indicated as circles (with wikidata indicated as ‘WD’), with grey lines linking databases in the network if their data is aligned. Generated from https://lod-cloud.net/datasets .
DBpedia as the most interlinked LOD dataset and crystallization point of the Linked Open Data Cloud since 2008
DBpedia as the most interlinked LOD dataset and crystallization point of the Linked Open Data Cloud since 2008. Image from 2021, generated from https://lod-cloud.net.

In computing, linked data is structured data which is associated with ("linked" to) other data. Interlinking makes the data more useful through semantic queries. Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), coined the term in a 2006 design note about the Semantic Web project. Part of the vision of linked data is for the Internet to become a global database.

Linked data builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages and hyperlinks only for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers (machine readable). Linked data may also be open data, in which case it is usually described as Linked Open Data.

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