Linkre

Linkre is a term used in information technology to describe a system or standard for representing, managing, and resolving links between digital resources. It is not tied to a single official specification; it describes a family of approaches that emphasize bidirectional linking, explicit metadata, and persistent identifiers to improve traceability across distributed resources.

Origins and usage: The concept arises in discussions of knowledge graphs and digital libraries as a move beyond unidirectional hyperlinks toward richer link semantics. In practice, linkre can refer to a protocol, vocabulary, or software library that encodes a link with metadata such as source, target, relationship type, provenance, version, and access constraints.

Architecture and components: Typical implementations provide a link registry or index, a set of relationship types, and a resolver or API that can retrieve the linked resource and metadata. Formats commonly used include RDF, JSON-LD, and other structured representations to enable integration with semantic web or graph databases.

Applications and scope: Linkre-style linking is used in digital libraries to track citations and sources, in knowledge graphs to connect entities, and in data portals to describe data lineage and dependencies. It supports versioning and retraction, helping users understand link histories.

See also: hyperlinks, link rot, RDF, JSON-LD, knowledge graph, persistent identifiers, provenance.