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What is Linked Data?

Say you want to find all the actors from the movie "The Shining",



and their birthdays,



using a computer program.



Web APIs exist for this,



You could use Rotten Tomatoes,



or IMDB's API,

To get all the actors starring the movie,



but they have no birthday information!



However, if you use a Linked Data resource,



such as LinkedMDB,



it has data about "The Shining",



which contains links to third-party data,



and this third-party data may contain extra data
(such as actor's birthdays).



BOOM! You have just discovered new data,



you couldn't do this with Web APIs.


Let's try another example.

Remember foreign keys in relational databases?



They help with cross-referencing data across tables,
    


so you could distribute your data,



into simple and maintainable resources.



Linked Data follows these same principles,



and it uses URLs instead of foreign keys,


so that you can cross-reference data from other servers!


 
It's basically making of the Web one huge decentralized database.



You can transform your data into Linked Data,



and enrich this huge decentralized database.



For further information about Linked Data check out this video,