Monday, January 11, 2010

Web guru Berners-Lee highlights open data

By Galen Moore

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.

Scientists’ possessive view toward data is changing, Berners-Lee said, as researchers begin to understand what bloggers have come to know — that if information is shared, it can draw together people with similar interests who can help advance common goals.

However, he enumerated several challenges before the opening of a global marketplace for data. For example, applications built on freely available data can make lots of money, but how can the system ensure that those who compile such data are compensated fairly?

Berners-Lee also expressed frustration with social media websites that set up walls to prevent users from sharing information across networks, or playing with the data they and others have contributed to the network. For sites that seek to wall themselves off, two possible outcomes exist, he said. “Either you become the most powerful site in the world, or you die.”