Hypermedia is defined by the presence of application control information embedded within, or as a layer above, the presentation of information. [@fielding2000]
Distributed hypermedia allows the presentation and control information to be stored at remote locations. [@fielding2000]
All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. … The process of tying two items together is the important thing.
The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.[@licklider1960]
Let me introduce the word “hypertext” to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it.[@nelson1965]
What is hypermedia? Hypermedia is the union of two information processing technologies: hypertext and multimedia. Hypertext information is accessed in more than one order. Multimedia information is communicated by more than one means.[@goldfarb1991]
The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Any information that can be named can be a resource: a document or image, a temporal service (e.g. “today’s weather in Los Angeles”), a collection of other resources, a non-virtual object (e.g. a person), and so on.
In other words, any concept that might be the target of an author’s hypertext reference must fit within the definition of a resource. A resource is a conceptual mapping to a set of entities, not the entity that corresponds to the mapping at any particular point in time.
Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods.
More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as “a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.”
To get back to the question of a good text, a good text on the Web today is in the first place that magic set of strings which the Web (meaning the bots, the agents, the people on the Web) can make sense of as to connect it to their relevant task.
