Linked Data - Principles

Principles

Tim Berners-Lee outlined four principles of linked data in his Design Issues: Linked Data note, paraphrased along the following lines:

1. Use URIs to identify things.
2. Use HTTP URIs so that these things can be referred to and looked up ("dereferenced") by people and user agents.
3. Provide useful information about the thing when its URI is dereferenced, using standard formats such as RDF/XML.
4. Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data to improve discovery of other related information on the Web.

Tim Berners-Lee gave a presentation on linked data at the TED 2009 conference. In it, he restated the linked data principles as three "extremely simple" rules:

1. All kinds of conceptual things, they have names now that start with HTTP.
2. I get important information back. I will get back some data in a standard format which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know about that thing, about that event.
3. I get back that information it's not just got somebody's height and weight and when they were born, it's got relationships. And when it has relationships, whenever it expresses a relationship then the other thing that it's related to is given one of those names that starts with HTTP.

Note that although the second rule mentions "standard formats", it does not require any specific standard, such as RDF/XML.