The Open Data Revolution

Abstract

minute format of this increasingly influential event, he reminded his audience how the Web was born. It was born, in part, he recalled from frustration—frustration about the difficulty of sharing information, different and non-interoperable formats for everything from documents to datasets. Surely there was a better, simpler, more universal way of connecting information across machines and operating systems, applications and programs, individuals and groups. His work on URLs, HTTP, HTML, and libWWW embodies a very rare capacity to distill simplicity from complexity. He understood how persistent identifiers and their resolution had to be at the heart of a distributed information fabric. He understood that links did not have to be bi-directional or ultimately resolve the overall distributed system to succeed. His proposals and code were sufficiently powerful to facilitate a global information fabric but not so complex as to render them incapable of scaling. The protocols and code he developed for the first Web server, client, and browser changed the world. During his TED talk, Tim pointed out that the motive force behind the Web was the community of people sharing content, resources, and learning. He emphasized that building a Web that met his original ambitions was very much unfinished business. The real power would be to go much further in publishing and to connect the data contained within documents and datasets—“now I want you to put your data on the Web” he says 3 minutes and 50 seconds into his talk. His frustration this time is that we don’t have data on the Web as data! This statement links back to The Open Data Revolution