Linked Data – the next web
Tim Berners-Lee is widely credited with the invention of World Wide Web around 1989, though it remained a theoretical exercise until the implementation of its principles in 1993 through a browser called Mosaic by a team led by Marc Andreesen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. The rapid progress of web is testament to the notion of hyperlinked information.
Recently, Tim has moved on to the next web. He has come up with the idea called Linked Data. In simple terms, every one can put data about themselves on the web which are linked to other data and that the data is decoupled from applications that access them. One could argue that we are already there.
For example, if you store your data in the cloud with vendors like Apple, Google or Microsoft, there are literally thousands of applications that can access the data with your consent. In other words, the data is decoupled from the application. The methodology used by any application to fetch data anywhere is referred to as the Application Programming Interface or API. It is true that there is no single standard for this and each system has its own description of API and even more annoying is that these change so often. However, I am sure there is much more to this that we don’t understand but he does!
One thing that I am always interested in how to use these concepts to bring fairness to the game of data. What follows are my thinking based on some of what I understand to be the linked data concept and I may be totally off base here!