Linked Data

The goal of Linked Data is to publish structured data in such a way that it can be easily consumed and combined with other Linked Data.

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The Big Picture: Building a Web of Data

Linked Data is not only about exposing data using Web technologies. Nor is it simply an elegant way to solve interoperability issues. Linked data is fundamentally about building a Web of Data.

Imagine hundreds of different data sets published on the Web according to the Linked Data principles: thousands and thousands different identifiers you can rely to grab data about books, movies, actors, cities, or anything your can imagine. In few words, such datasets form a giant Web-scale database you could potentially embed in your applications and reference whenever you needed.

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A pragmatic and informal set of metrics have been introduced by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web: the 5 Stars of Linked Open Data. Basically, it's a set of incremental characteristics that published data sets should have. The more of these features a data set has, the higher the quality of its data.

• One star: make your stuff available on the Web (whatever format)
• Two stars: make it available as structured data (e.g. Excel instead of image scan of a table)
• Three stars: non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV instead of Excel)
• Four starts: use URLs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff
• Five stars: link your data to other people's data to provide context

Data published in accordance to the Linked Data principles is clearly 5 Star quality. 5 Star datasets are intrinsically more valuable because the data within has been made accessible through the Web (so you can get at it), has been exposed with open standards (so its easily consumable), and has been linked to other data (so it's verifiable and more easily integrated). The combination makes application development absolutely more cost-efficient and less time-consuming compared to using less quality datasets.

(From https://cambridgesemantics.com/blog/semantic-university/intro-semantic-web/intro-linked-data/)