data-target is used by bootstrap to make your life easier. You (mostly) do not need to write a single line of Javascript to use their pre-made JavaScript components.
The data-target attribute should contain a CSS selector that points to the HTML Element that will be changed.
In this example, the button has data-target="#myModal", if you click on it, <div id="myModal">...</div> will be modified (in this case faded in).
This happens because #myModal in CSS selectors points to elements that have an id attribute with the myModal value.
The toggle tells Bootstrap what to do and the target tells Bootstrap which element is going to open. So whenever a link like that is clicked, a modal with an id of “basicModal” will appear.