The Next Web — Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee’s TED talk on what came after hypertext: the World Wide Web linked documents, and the unfinished half of the idea is linking data. “Imagine them all being part of some big, virtual documentation system in the sky.”

Notes

• https://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0204-ted-tbl/#(1)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM6XIICm_qo
• On the invention of the World Wide Web - “In fact, on all these discs there were documents. So if you just imagined them all being part of some big, virtual documentation system in the sky, say on the Internet, then life would be so much easier.”
• Documents you read. Data you can do all kinds of stuff in the computer.
• “It’s really important to have a lot of data”
• 3 Rules of Putting Things Online
  • Using “http” to refer not just to names of documents, but people, etc.
  • I can look up that http name and get data back
  • That data will have relationships
    • When I look up a person, I can see where they’re born, etc.
• “The more things you get to connect together, the more powerful it is.”
• Chris Bizer noticed the little boxes of data on Wikipedia and wrote dbpedia
  • The original Graph Overview
• “All the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now — curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer’s, understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable, understanding how the world works. The people who are going to solve those — the scientists — they have half-formed ideas in their head, they try to communicate those over the web. But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases, often sitting in their computers, and actually, currently not shared.”
• If you ask a specific question of Google you can’t get an answer if no one has ever answered the question before. When you ask that question of the raw data that has been created specifically to answer those kinds of questions, then you can get real answers.
• The 2009 internet was fire
• “And that is what Linked Data is all about. It’s about people doing their bit to produce a little bit, and it all connecting. ==That’s how linked data works. You do your bit. Everybody else does theirs.==”