Publishing distributed files as Linked Data

File systems act as backbones of many information systems, however, it is still hard to search and integrate information about files which are distributed in different locations over different protocols. Traditional researches about file systems focus on file sharing and transfer, paying little attention to semantic annotation and interlinking of files in distributed environment. In this paper, we study how to publish and consume files as Linked Data. Some principles are discussed in detail, including choosing appropriate HTTP URIs, providing metadata and content of files, generating external links between files and other resources, connecting real repositories located in different places. Then we present VDB-FilePub, a component of VisualDB for publishing the files stored in different repositories as Linked Data. After introducing the architecture of VDB-FilePub, we give some scenarios of how other applications consume Linked Data exposed by VDB-FilePub in the Scientific Database Project.