Sending and receiving data is an important requirement of all computing infrastructures with components that need to interact. This interoperability requirement has been the focus of research since the beginning of the computer age. In this paper we will illustrate that in order to achieve interoperability, computer hardware and software have to be able to interpret data, i.e., understand their structure and their meaning. That understanding has to be conveyed somehow from the real world by the creators of the computing components and brought into a machine-processable form. In most cases, that means that formal models of those real world aspects have to be created and transferred into the computing environment. Here we will show from a data-centric point of view how those models developed over time from early relational database models, via document models and the (Semantic) Web to Linked Data and the Internet of Things.

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