Linked Data Concept

Linked data is a set of best practices for publishing and deploying instance and class data using the RDF data model; it is a best practice of the semantic Web. Two of the best practices are to name the data objects using uniform resource identifiers (URIs), and to expose the data for access via the HTTP protocol. Both of these practices enable the Web to become a distributed database, which also means that Web architectures can also be readily employed.

A few useful starting references, besides the Wikipedia entry below, are:
 * http://linkeddata.org
 * The linked data FAQ, with a focus on the enterprise,
 * Tim Berners-Lee's four design principles of linked data.