ON NEXT STEPS FOR THE WEB

20 YEARS LATER

One of the highlight presentations for me from this year's TED Conference a few weeks ago was by Sir Tim Berners-Lee , the inventor of the world wide web. 

In his 18-minute talk, he laid out the ground work for what's needed next for the web's logical evolution.  The full video of his talk is now up on TED.com.  Here's how they introduce him:

"20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together."

Liz Gannes of GigaOm summarized the talk a few weeks ago as follows:

"Founder of the web Tim Berners-Lee spoke of the next grassroots communication movement he wants to start: linked data. Much in the way his development of the web stemmed out of the frustrations of brilliant people working in silos, he is frustrated that the data of the world is shut apart in offline databases.

Berners-Lee wants raw data to come online so that it can be related to each other and applied together for multidisciplinary purposes, like combining genomics data and protein data to try to cure Alzheimer’s. He urged “raw data now,” and an end to “hugging your data” — i.e. keeping it private — until you can make a beautiful web site for it.

Berners-Lee said his dream is already on its way to becoming a reality, but that it will require a format for tagging data and understanding relationships between different pieces of it in order for a search to turn up something meaningful."

The whole video presentation is well worth watching. 

* Image source.