Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, coined the term in a design note discussing issues around the Semantic Web project
The goal of the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach group's Linking Open Data community project is to extend the Web with a data commons by publishing various open datasets as RDF on the Web and by setting RDF links between data items from different data sources. In October 2007, datasets consisted of over two billion RDF triples, which were interlinked by over two million RDF links.
Phi Beta Iota: Wikipedia has its limitations. This is not a very old idea as they suggest, but rather an extraordinary new idea, word-level linking. Doug Engelbart's Open Hyperdocument system (OHS) and Pierre Levy's Internet Economy Meta Language (IEML) are related ideas. What this huge new idea does is go beyond the “thing” to provide its attributes in Resource Description Framework (RDF). The attributes that are of interest from a public intelligence point of view are those of “true cost” — time, space, energy, water, child labor, tax avoidance, etcetera. Hence, each datum will be “context aware” and a specific item from a specific company will know where it is in time and space, its costs to date, and its projected costs into the future, all in relation to the specifics of its being.
DuckDuckGo / Linked Open Data (LOD)
Here is the updated image from Wikipedia of the linked datasets as of 2011:
