Linked Data

wp:Linked data

People consume the web by clicking links and visiting web pages. If those pages are marked up semantically, then computers can consume the web by visiting the same URLs but "viewing" linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data). Perhaps the best known example is LinkedIn. Instead of publishing resumes in plain markup, LinkedIn uses a markup that is understandable to an algorithm which means it's not just a collection of resumes, but rather a database of resumes. Since it's data, you can query it.

Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), coined the term in a 2006 design note about the Semantic Web project.

This Wiki

Semantic Properties

This wiki uses the Semantic MediaWiki extension to enable semantic properties within the article content. To see what those properties are, and where they're used, visit the

1. Special:Properties page

Interwiki Linking

This wiki uses the InterWiki Links system to easily link into other wikis. However, this is just a convenience, or shorthand notation for creating a hyperlink. However, if that target wiki has data endpoints, then it can be a way of linking to the data. Also, Interwiki links are exposed through the search system, so that you can search for an article in any "linked" wiki by using the compact URI syntax in the searchbar. So for example, if you search for 'wp:Something' you'll be directed to the 'Something' article on WikiPedia. Ultimately, through improved semantic notation and querying, you can get answers to questions like 'Show me the Italian Restaurants in my neighborhood' from a wiki of Restaurants.

MediaWiki Commons

Through the "InstantCommons" system, this wiki can immediately show (and locally cache) any image found on commons.wikipedia.org. This creates a multimedia diaspora. The future Search system in MediaWiki is pursuing even greater "awareness" of global data.

See Also

1. DBPedia
2. http://linkeddata.org/
3. http://lod-cloud.net/ where you can see the graphic representation of the "LOD Cloud" aka The Linking Open Data cloud diagram.
4. http://en.lodlive.it/?http://dbpedia.org/resource/Mountain_biking example of "Mountain biking" linked data

Uniform Resource Locator = an address of a web page or other component, including the protocol.