Session 2: ReFrame- Sir Timothy Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, Inventor of the world wide web (no, really) decades ago. Saw the potential of hypertext language. Talks about his presenting the first examples of connecting documents in a hypertext manner... but then they needed people to post post post! Once there were documents, then we needed data! He's referring to Hans Roesling's amazing talk that explained how Hans shattered ideas we held and moreover created Gapminder to connect data-to-data SO IT WOULD BE USEFUL. You need a lot of data and then you need to be able to share it.

Linked data:

1) use them for things besides documents. peoples, places, products, etc
2) i fetch http data in a standardized format
3) NOW the data needs to be in relationships

This seems basic and intuitive and obvious but someone's got to say it the first time to bring it to life. When you name something, you give it life

DBpedia farms info from wikipedia... and other sources (projcet gutenberg etc).

Sir Timothy and Hans are both insistant that THERE MUST ALWAYS BE MORE DATA. Then we can draw information together and learn more and more.

Obama promised transparency by posting governmental information online- Sir Timothy is hoping it's linked data.

He doesn't want you to be "data hugging" hoping that you post it before it's even pretty. He even had us say it all together now:

RAW
DATA
NOW

I'm on the cutting edge of this by posting without editing aren't I? ;) Erm. Sort of.


It's amazing how focused he is about sharing info. Of course he is, he invented the web. The frustation is breaking down the silos of information. Facebook and Myspace can't climb over their own walls.

"You may not have much data to post, but you know to demand it."

To sum up: link data now!