linked data

Linked data is one of the technologies used in the Semantic Web. URIs are used in RDF to represent concepts, but may not be retrievable as a URL. In a linked data resourcs, the URIs can be retrieved on the web as an RDF documents that gives information about the thing refered to by the URI. This enables automated reasoning systems to find out more about things, in a similar way to humans accessing web pages. Often they have a human readable form as well, which is retreived either by changing the file extension (html vs. rdf) or using special HTTP headers when retrieving the document.