Academic data management has become an increasingly challenging task as research evolves over time. Essential tasks such as information retrieval and research networking have turned into extremely difficult operations due to an ever-growing number of researchers and scientific articles. Numerous initiatives have emerged in the IT environments to address this issue, especially focused on web technologies. Although those approaches have individually provided solutions for diverse problems, they still can not offer integrated knowledge bases nor flexibility to exploit adequately this information. In this article, we present REDI, a Linked Data-powered framework for academic knowledge management and research networking, which introduces a new perspective of integration. REDI combines information from multiple sources into a consolidated knowledge base through state-of-the-art procedures and leverages semantic web standards to represent the information. Moreover, REDI takes advantage of such knowledge for data visualisation and analysis, which ultimately improves and simplifies many activities including research networking.