Open data heralds the internet’s next exciting phase

Considered one of the pioneering fathers of the internet, Berners-Lee believes we are only at the dawn of an even more exciting era - the era of open data and the semantic web, where almost every feasible physical device or piece of data will be interlinked online.

“The semantic web vision has taken a long time to come to fruition because the web is so exciting in many other ways,” says Berners-Lee, who has been driving new metadata labelling formats to make everything linkable.

This brings us on to the next big revolution - open data - and he says governments and businesses are at the forefront of opening up datasets for individuals, citizens and other businesses to make more informed decisions.The future web we are about to see will be one in which data and devices everywhere will be interlinked and metadata is central to this - effectively who owns A or B in the same way individuals own the deeds to their homes but the difference is allowing this data to be usable and open.

He cites the corner boxes you see on Wikipedia, for example, as a case of how databases and datasets can be globally linked.

(read more on Silicon Republic)