Linking Things on the Web

Linked Data is a bit of a buzzword at the moment in the cultural heritage sector. At first glance, the principles of Linked Data seem simple enough. However web developers, designers and architects who attempt to put these ideas into practice soon find themselves not only learning a set of new technologies, but cast adrift in debates about web architecture, the semantic web, artificial intelligence and the nature of identity. In this talk I will briefly outline some of these historical debates, and attempt to characterize some pragmatic ways of realizing the goals of Linked Data with examples from the Web we have today.