In the Federation linked-data has then benefit of being able to be aggregated form a range of sources in a manor that is logically consistent and can provide sophisticated processing and reasoning.
With a little prior thought and structuring of the semantincs basic linked data can be provided which enhances site wide search and the graphing of relationships.
Linked-data, and more specifically JSON-LD stored as Site/Page Metadata would enable the Federation to leverage standard search and aggregation software being continuously developed for the Linked Data Platform. It also has a reasonably close relationship to other forms of search we need to do on links to enable back-links.
Portable Linked Profiles enable individual entities to own their own Linked data profiles in a standardised way that facilitates matching and searching of skills and services - github 
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We've scraped 500 sites accessible from one happening #2 site. From these we have tallied counts of pages, items, actions and other pages cited.
We're experimenting with full text search of the federation. For the moment this is both easier to code and easier to host than searching the web. search
# About Linked Data
In computing, linked data describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful through semantic queries - wikipedia
See also JSON-LD and the Linked Data Platform. Also worth a look at these visualisations - webknox.com
Class linkages within the linking open data datasets - wikipedia 
It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried.
Tim Berners-Lee, coined the term in a design note about the Semantic Web project - w3.org
Demo
The video below two users, each using their preferred client. The clients are used only as UI to allow them to post new messages and see other people's messages. The actual storage is located on the users' personal servers.
Every time they post a new message (content), it will be stored on their personal servers. This means that the companies or websites offering the clients (i.e. http://cimba.co/ and http://rww-apps.github.io/kima) will NEVER see the actual content; in other words, they are only used to serve static documents like HTML, Javascript and CSS files.
YOUTUBE z0_XaJ97rF0
Interoperability demo for the CrossCloud project. Published on 18 Mar 2014 - crosscloud.org
Principles
Tim Berners-Lee outlined four principles of linked data:
TED tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web Tim Berners-Lee: The next web (Feb 2009)
Quote: Tim Berners-Lee
All kinds of conceptual things, they have names now that start with HTTP.
If I take one of these HTTP names and I look it up [..] I will get back some data in a standard format which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know about that thing, about that event.
When I get back that information it's not just got somebody's height and weight and when they were born, it's got relationships.
And when it has relationships, whenever it expresses a relationship then the other thing that it's related to is given one of those names that starts with HTTP.
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DBpedia - a dataset containing extracted data from Wikipedia; it contains about 3.4 million concepts described by 1 billion triples, including abstracts in 11 different languages
FOAF - a dataset describing persons, their properties and relationships
GeoNames provides RDF descriptions of more than 7,500,000 geographical features worldwide.
UMBEL - a lightweight reference structure of 20,000 subject concept classes and their relationships derived from OpenCyc, which can act as binding classes to external data; also has links to 1.5 million named entities from DBpedia and YAGO