On the occasion of 20 years www, Tim Berners-Lee gave an interesting presentation in a TED talk. Tim retells the story of how he invented the World Wide Web, an idea — “vague but exciting” his boss remarked with a pencil on the side of Tim’s memo — that entirely changed the way in which people around the world exchange and access information. The big challenge of our days is, to extend the Web to a source of knowledge, where not only documents are linked, but all kinds of data, a concept Tim refers to as “Linked Data”.
Although the Semantic Web has not become a reality, yet, the idea of Linked Data is gaining momentum. People begin to realize that in many cases it makes no sense to “lock up data” and with Web Services and REST it has become easier to make internal data accessible to external users. The main problem today is, that, while on the one hand data providers make data accessible via APIs, on the other hand they build walled gardens since they monetize on user-generated content. I am not sure how this problem can be overcome, but licensing seems to be a possible way. Data providers could charge money on a per-use basis for data to be used in a different commercial context or give it away for free if it is used for non-profit. Apache 3.0 for Linked Data?
