This document discusses using semantic web technologies like linked data to improve the sharing, analysis, and reuse of research data. It describes two projects aimed at applying these techniques: the CEDAR project, which semantically links historical census data from the Netherlands, and the LarKC project, which develops a scalable linked data analysis pipeline. Key challenges discussed include building tools to help data publishers while maintaining provenance, accommodating the full research lifecycle, and overcoming heterogeneity to enable querying across datasets. TabLinker is presented as a tool to help with the (semi-)automatic conversion and harmonization of heterogeneous tabular data into linked open data.