Web guru Berners-Lee highlights open data

by Galen Moore MHT, Mass High Tech

This morning, World Wide Web Consortium Director Tim Berners-Lee laid out his vision for how linked data will change the web, before a roomful of about 100 MIT students. Berners-Lee’s slide presentation kicked off a week-long lab in which participants are challenged to “build the next killer app” using data available through the web.

“(In the future), people browsing the web won’t just be sitting there browsing it,” said Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web as a medium for data exchange via the Internet in 1989. Instead, if databases are made open and available, they’ll run programs that will automatically seek out and find useful information, he predicted.

Data has already become more openly available in categories like mapping, government and scientific research, Berners-Lee said. He pointed to OpenStreetMap, a free, wiki world map online that, unlike proprietary services such as Google Maps or Mapquest, does not claim ownership of edits or overlays generated by users and developers.

Life sciences researchers, in particular, have made strides toward standardization of data so that it can be used outside traditional research boundaries, he said.  Report