I keep hearing the term Linked Data, but what does it mean?
More or less what it says. All the data on the Internet linked together.
And that is important to me because…?
Your company, like everyone else’s company has a number of separate processes going. Accounts, marketing, HR, government compliances, legal issues, transport considerations. The information that pertains to each process is stored for convenience in separate databases. These databases are associated with the various applications that are used to create them. SAP for accounts, various spreadsheet formats, and document pages.
All contain information vital to the running of your company. All contain information which is mutually inaccessible to each other.
It has worked so far because we have had the human workaround. If a report has to be written for the quarterly board meeting, then someone has to get the information from each of these ‘data silos’ separately and spend a goodly amount of time and energy on finessing the disparate contents into something understandable and useful to act as a basis for a fruitful discussion.
With Linked Data technology running on your system, you ask your system for the information you want in the format you want. The computer itself works out what is relevant and useful. Linked Data enables the various databases to talk to each other and work out what is needed.
