
Tim Berners-Lee's TED Talk: The next Web of open, linked data - mcxx
http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html
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tobych
I found myself cringing watching this talk. Berners-Lee seemed so nervous,
stressed out. Certainly under strain, for whatever reason. I hope he is/was
okay, you know, generally, and that it was just that big red timer and the
VIPs in the audience, or something equally obvious. I watched the video a
couple of days after Bill Gates' talk about malaria, and sure, maybe linked
data may end up saving the world'n'all, but I did cringe when he invited the
audience to shout "Raw Data Now!". Especially when compared to Gates' letting
mosquitoes out into the audience, it just seemed silly. Mmm. Now I'm sounding
all holier-than-thou, huh.

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mhausenblas
IMHO TimBL did a great job at TED. I dunno where you have seen him stressed
out - he certainly enjoyed it. Btw, linked data is mainly about URIs and HTTP
and yes RDF (for the data model part) and some lightweight vocabularies such
as FOAF, SOIC, Dublin Core, etc. - check out <http://webofdata.wordpress.com>
as well, I blog there about it ;)

Cheers, Michael

PS: To be honest, I was also sort of surprised to see him calling the audience
like 'speak after me'. However, I was positively surprised - I really like
when people put enthusiasm in things and not only give interesting but boring
talks. In that sense I very much support TimBL to continue this (though, maybe
not go as far as Steven B. at MS did with his infamous 'monkey dance' ;)

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CaptSolo
you must have meant SIOC (where SOIC is written)

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extension
Open data would be a much more sellable concept if it was integrated into the
development process in a fairly seamless way. If the application itself could
be built around the open data standards, without obviously spending a lot of
time on things that provide no immediate value, it would be much easier to
justify.

My boss/client is not going to pay me to add REST interfaces and metadata that
has only vague hypothetical future usefulness _but_ he might pay me to build
the data layer for the application in a way that just happens to also be
somewhat open, especially if doing so makes the application better or easier
to build.

To meet that requirement, the universal ontology stuff might have to be
sacrificed but just having API access to more web apps, even if they are all
proprietary, would be a worthwhile compromise.

Based on the video alone, I thought that was what TBL was proposing but I see
from the links that he's still pushing the whole RDF rigamarole. That might
catch on among a few large informational projects but the web at large is
either going to ignore it or make a mess out of it.

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CaptSolo
The strength of RDF is in seamless data integration.

Think flexible data mashups (where you don't need to code to the interface of
a particular service because they all use same linked data principles).

I have seen people build a simple application and then increase its value by
automatically pulling in information from other large source of linked data
such as DBPedia and GeoNames.

Fully agree that we need simple and understandable demos that show the value
of linked data (assuming for a moment that linked data have business value :).

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extension
That's an example of value derived from consuming generic data, but how do you
get value from providing it?

Providing generic third party access is a rare case in business. Usually, data
is used by third parties for a specific purpose that requires substantial
domain knowledge, in which case an RDF description is probably redundant and
useless.

There may be business models based on generic data but those businesses will
face a serious bootstrapping problem as they will likely require either a
critical mass of generic data providers or consumers, which are mutually
dependent.

The bootstrapping will have to be grassroots, as it was for the original
"unstructured" web, which succeeded due to the ease of publishing HTML
documents, which is much simpler than publishing structured data.

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billroberts
"how do you get value from providing it" - how do you get value from
publishing anything on the web? The same principles apply. The value comes
from making information more readily available, so people can find out new
things, make connections, do their jobs better. If you want to make money from
it (and of course a lot of data has already been paid for by the taxpayer)
then you can do all the usual stuff: charge for access, charge for services
built on top of the data, provide it free and use it to build your brand or to
gain attention of people that can be sold to advertisers etc.

One important use case is publishing data for re-use within an enterprise or
other organisation - it doesn't necessarily need to always be public.

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andreyf
Spot on!

I want it to be trivial to make a greasemonkey script which adds people's
small facebook profile photo into their news.yc profiles.

Or add a feature which lets me share a news.yc story on anything that
implements a share-link interface - say, with my facebook friends, or my
twitter followers, without leaving news.yc.

These things are possible right now, but doing them requires a lot of work,
most of which would be duplicated (lots of html parsing, for example). How can
we make it easier?

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andreyf
Here's another, if you want to get the gist of what I'm thinking:

When I go to news.yc from my work browser, display any blocker bugs assigned
to me in our internal bug tracking application on top of the stories, in bold.

Again, this is doable in greasemonkey, but would should require a trivial
amount of work with the right API's in place.

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jlm382
His ideas for the future of the web are vague at best, but the bottom line:
the internet is only at its infancy.

In 10 years from now, the use cases and abilities of the internet are likely
to be drastically different. His talk is just hinting at the ideas of whats
yet to come.

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juliend2
I did not find a lot of info about his idea (Linked Data). Does anybody knows
if there is a standard or something that is written at this time regarding his
vision explained in this video?

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acangiano
It's just a user friendly term for Semantic Web.

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dantheman
Nope, the semantic web was about reasoning. Linked data is about linking data,
and in effect creating a large distributed database. One way to think about
it, is to consider building a system that stores a tracking code for a
package. Instead of storing XXX-XXXXXX-XXX use the URI so that it can just be
deferenced to get more information. In effect you are linking your store data
with shippers data.

This could allow you to write trivial queries to quickly identify if there are
bottlenecks in how your packages are shipped etc.

Also the development of SPARQL was a significant milestone, that really
changes how one works with rdf.

A linked data web could then be used to for reasoning on top of it, but it
would need to be large and thus it needs to be useful before the reasoning can
be used. For instance, imagine the original web when people were working on
search engines with only a few pages... The pages need to exist first.

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acangiano
Quoting Wikipedia: "Linked Data is a sub-topic of the Semantic Web. The term
Linked Data is used to describe a method of exposing, sharing, and connecting
data via dereferenceable URIs on the Web."

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jemmons
If only his presentation had a "View Source" button...

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CaptSolo
Just do "View Source" on its slides: <http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0204-ted-
tbl/>

