Linking

Linking is the act of establishing a connection between two or more elements to enable navigation, data integration, or coherence. It occurs across multiple domains, including the web, databases, linguistics, and knowledge representation, and it often implies a relationship that makes one element meaningful in relation to another.

In web contexts, linking refers to hyperlinks that connect documents or resources. Hyperlinks are typically created with anchor elements and display anchor text. They can be internal, linking within the same site, or external, linking to a different site. Links use URLs, which can be relative or absolute, and may carry attributes such as rel to indicate relationships or behavior (for example, nofollow or canonical). Good linking practices improve navigation, accessibility, and search-engine discoverability, while broken links or link rot pose maintenance challenges.

Data and knowledge linking focus on identifying and connecting related data points across datasets. Data linking may involve probabilistic matching, deterministic identifiers, or entity resolution to determine when different records refer to the same real-world entity. In knowledge graphs, linking creates a network of entities and relationships that supports integrated queries and reasoning.

In linguistics, linking describes how elements in discourse refer to one another, including anaphora resolution where pronouns point back to antecedents, and cohesion strategies that tie sentences and ideas together. It also encompasses the syntactic and semantic connections that make textual meaning coherent.

Best practices across domains emphasize descriptive anchor text, accessibility, link stability, and transparent provenance. In data linking, quality and documentation of assumptions are critical to reliable integration.