SPARQLing new website
Three and a half years ago Tim Berners-Lee published a summary of his thinking to that point on the design considerations of publishing linked data on the internet. Since then the W3C issued a "Recommendation" for the "SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language", the term "Semantic Web" has reached mainstream use[1] and Sir Tim was invested with the Order of Merit. This last fact initially looks like it has the least significance for the advancement of the Free Our Data cause but as it has been widely reported it was at a dinner for recipients of this honour that the following conversation took place:
"Gordon Brown said to me, 'How should the UK make the best use of the internet?' and I replied that the government should just put all of its data on it," Berners-Lee recalled. "And he said 'OK, let's do it'."
This is very modern attitude with the colloquial name JFDI that I'm not going to expand on a corporate blog and last year saw in quick succession the cabinet office announcing that Sir Tim would be coming on board to deal with this issue, another design document and a dribble of information about a site to be called data.gov.uk.
Why is any of this important? Well from a purely economic view we have already paid for this data with our taxes and making it available can only lead to opportunities for innovation around it. From the opposite end of the spectrum, niche uses of data that would never find traction in a departments budget can be created using one of the plethora of mashup toolkits and put online for no matter how small an audience and it is impossible to predict which of these could be found to be useful and grow to national prominence. In the middle ground the day to day operations of a lot of businesses will be transformed if this trend expands to the heavy plant of data sets the Postcode Address File and the Ordnance Survey's map data.
There is no doubt that these developments along with similar initiatives elsewhere, most notably in the USA, that these are exciting times for those of use that get excited about data and its online applications. This year will see whether government can be truly convinced that data is king so selling us our own is counter productive and that if you truly love it you should set it free.
[1]even if it is still on occasion confused with other uses of the term semantic on and about the internet
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Tony Kennick's blog posts
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