The Linked Data principles provide a unified interface to data and software systems based on web architecture. Linked Data is increasingly popular in scenarios where data and systems from multiple providers have to be integrated, both in an enterprise setting and on open data from the web.

The lecture covers foundational techniques to access, process and integrate data, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective, and provides a coherent treatment of protocols and languages specified by the World Wide Web Consortium. The lecture combines techniques from different areas, such as databases and artificial intelligence, adapted for use in a decentralised setting on the web. The overarching topic is to facilitate data integration on the basis of resource-oriented modelling, knowledge representation, hyperlinks and state transfer between user agents and servers.

The lecture sets out with a history of hypertext systems, followed from an introduction to web architecture and knowledge representation, including algorithms for query evaluation and deductive reasoning. The lecture closes with a user agents for querying integrated data from sources attainable through the web.