Coined by the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Tim Berners-Lee, linked data is a computing term that is used in the publishing of structured data so that it can be connected and become more utilized through semantic queries. To fully understand linked data, it is best to know what the semantic web is. It is simply a web of data that is composed of dates and titles with some part numbers and chemical properties. Pretty much, it is a mixture of all kinds of data that you can think of. The collection of semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SKOS, SPARQL, HTTP and URIs just to name a few creates an environment where application can provide an inquiry about data and draw inferences from. To make it easier to get access on this, it is crucial to have a large amount of data on the Web available in a format that is manageable and reachable with the utilization of semantic web tools. The data collected should be interlinked and interrelated with each other to create a network of data. This is where linked data comes in. To be able to achieve linked data, technologies are obtainable for a popular format which is RDF. In turn, this would provide either a conversion or on-the-fly access to on hand databases (relational, XML, HTML, etc). Query standpoints are done to be able to get through that data without any hassle.
On this note, this is where the world wide web consortium (W3C) locks itself in the process. It provides assortment technologies like RDF, GRDDL, POWDER, RDF, the upcoming R2RML, RIF, and SPARQL to be able to obtain data. This makes it accessible for one to get data from varying sources to be linked and queried.
This is how important the linked data is. It is what makes the semantic web necessary in the process. It is a large scale integration to understand better data on the Web. Most of the applications are listed in a collection of semantic web case studies and use cases that are importantly based on the availability of and incorporation of linked data at different level of difficulty.
An example of this is the common case of a large linked dataset is DBPedia which is not only includes Wikipedia data but also integrates links to other data sets on the Web like Geonames. Applications may take advantage of the extra and possibly more precise knowledge from other data sets when developing it. Once the integration of facts from numerous datasets is done, it then provides a much improved user experience. It eliminates any inconvenience that is caused by not being able to have data related to each other. It has to has a relationship with each other. Thus, it is essential to have a network of data.
This is how linked data works. With this said, it is best to know what it is all about so as to gaining more understanding on building links later on your websites and applications.