Tim Berners-Lee's TED Talk: The next Web of open, linked data

I found myself cringing watching this talk. Berners-Lee seemed so nervous, stressed out. Certainly under strain, for whatever reason. I hope he is/was okay, you know, generally, and that it was just that big red timer and the VIPs in the audience, or something equally obvious. I watched the video a couple of days after Bill Gates' talk about malaria, and sure, maybe linked data may end up saving the world'n'all, but I did cringe when he invited the audience to shout "Raw Data Now!". Especially when compared to Gates' letting mosquitoes out into the audience, it just seemed silly. Mmm. Now I'm sounding all holier-than-thou, huh.

Open data would be a much more sellable concept if it was integrated into the development process in a fairly seamless way. If the application itself could be built around the open data standards, without obviously spending a lot of time on things that provide no immediate value, it would be much easier to justify.<p>My boss/client is not going to pay me to add REST interfaces and metadata that has only vague hypothetical future usefulness <i>but</i> he might pay me to build the data layer for the application in a way that just happens to also be somewhat open, especially if doing so makes the application better or easier to build.<p>To meet that requirement, the universal ontology stuff might have to be sacrificed but just having API access to more web apps, even if they are all proprietary, would be a worthwhile compromise.<p>Based on the video alone, I thought that was what TBL was proposing but I see from the links that he's still pushing the whole RDF rigamarole. That might catch on among a few large informational projects but the web at large is either going to ignore it or make a mess out of it.

Spot on!<p>I want it to be trivial to make a greasemonkey script which adds people's small facebook profile photo into their news.yc profiles.<p>Or add a feature which lets me share a news.yc story on anything that implements a share-link interface - say, with my facebook friends, or my twitter followers, without leaving news.yc.<p>These things are possible right now, but doing them requires a lot of work, most of which would be duplicated (lots of html parsing, for example). How can we make it easier?

His ideas for the future of the web are vague at best, but the bottom line: the internet is only at its infancy.<p>In 10 years from now, the use cases and abilities of the internet are likely to be drastically different. His talk is just hinting at the ideas of whats yet to come.

I did not find a lot of info about his idea (Linked Data). Does anybody knows if there is a standard or something that is written at this time regarding his vision explained in this video?

If only his presentation had a "View Source" button...