For various reasons, I was unable to make it to Virginia for the event, but a scan through the presentations from Leigh, Tom Heath (another former colleague), Jordan Hatcher (with whom I worked on earlier iterations of the Open Data Commons license), and Creative Commons‘ Kaitlin Thaney, it looks like they did a great job covering the bases on this critically important aspect of the evolving Data Web.

If we are to encourage the sorts of break-out use of data that Tim Berners-Lee and Tim O’Reilly were discussing at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit, we need to move past the current laissez-faire approaches adopted by too many and ensure that there are licensing regimes in place to enable, facilitate and encourage widespread re-use.

As Leigh’s work demonstrates, we have a long way to go. Only around a third of the current Linked Data projects are explicitly licensing their content, and several of those may be mis-licensing by applying copyright-based licenses such as those from Creative Commons to data not covered by copyright legislation.

With the current state of data licensing, and the reliance of CC0 and Open Data Commons’ Public Domain Dedication and License upon the public domain as a means of overcoming territorial differences, will we find enterprise use of Linked Data increasingly relying upon the more cumbersome tool of contract law… to the detriment of a free and flexible exchange of ideas?

‘Linked Open Data Rights Survey‘ image by Leigh Dodds, shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ISWC linked data and the law (opencontentlawyer.com)
• Iswc2009 I. (ivan-herman.name)
• CC0 endorsed in Nature opinion piece (sciencecommons.org)
• Linked Data: Interpretants and Interpretation (phaneron.rickmurphy.org)

Tim Berners-Lee has been amongst those rallying to the cause, and working with Governments here and overseas to realise the opportunities in — first — simply getting data out and — second — ensuring the structure and linkages required if Government data is to form a useful foundation upon which others really can build.

Tim O’Reilly, too, has been pushing his notion of ‘Government as a Platform’ for some time, driving toward next week’s gov2.0 summit in Washington, DC. His arguments reached a broader audience with yesterday’s guest spot on TechCrunch.

O’Reilly points to some of the uses of Government data in his TechCrunch post, and I’m continuing my own efforts to secure podcast interviews with some of the more interesting examples that I come across.

One of the things, I think, that is most interesting about this ‘platform’ that O’Reilly describes is the myriad ways in which it potentially benefits so many different constituencies.

Government itself should certainly become more efficient, making better use of its own information ‘simply’ because it’s so much easier to see what’s there. John Sheridan of the UK Government’s Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) touched on some of these issues in our recent conversation, and the potential for discovering synergies across the Departmental and Agency divide is surely just beginning to be realised.

‘Activists’ of various kinds will have easier access to information in support of their various causes. Some of this information will, undoubtedly, be used to embarrass the authorities, and much of it will be skewed to present the truth in rather odd ways. Rather than simply leading to more informed activism by a vocal minority, however, David Eaves in Vancouver and Sunlight Labs’ David James both argue that better availability of data will make it easier for everybody to hold Government to account.

Researchers, such as Jim Hendler’s team at Rensselaer, are turning to resources like Data.gov in search of interesting technological problems and large pools of data upon which to test new techniques and ideas. The resulting data exhaust (in Hendler’s case, RDF versions of Data.gov resources) is then available for others to use in further innovation.

And (perhaps) most interestingly of all, the well understood trinity of open source software, commodity hardware and near-ubiquitous connectivity is coming together with increasingly available data to make the public sector information space — for far too long the expensive preserve of the big Consultancy firms and their ilk — interesting to start-ups and innovators.

Sunlight Labs‘ Apps for America2 contest is into its final stage (don’t forget to vote!), and the range of applications received is a clear indication that innovation in and around Government information is both possible and long overdue. Amongst the three finalists, This We Know appeals to my Semantic Web interests because of the particular technological approach they’ve adopted, but there’s plenty to admire in all three.

The test will come down the line, when working with Government data is no longer incentivised by competition glory and prize money, when it’s no longer the hot new source of Big Data for academic exploration, and when the activist arms race levels out at a new plateau of comparable informedness. When that day arrives, will enthusiastic entrepreneurs still be competing to extract additional capability from the Data.gov and Guardian apis, or will all of the hits to these sites emanate from the cubicles of Accenture, IBM and EDS?

Whilst I certainly hope that these mainstream exploiters of public sector information embrace the possibilities, it would be a sad day if independent grass-roots innovation atop the Platform of Government were so short-lived.

As such, I’ll be watching next week’s proceedings in Washington with interest.

Image of the Scottish Parliament by Stéphane Goldstein, shared under Creative Commons license on Flickr.

Before going any further, let’s get a few things crystal clear;

1. The recent success of the Linked Data meme is long overdue, very welcome, and entirely capable of carrying the Web of Data far beyond its current niche adherents. A lot of my current work involves arguing that more organisations should adopt this approach;
2. The Resource Description Framework, RDF, is a key — and powerful — piece in W3C‘s Semantic Web Architecture. Since its earliest days, I have played various parts in advocating the potential of RDF and will continue to do so;
3. RDF is an obvious means of publishing — and consuming — Linked Data powerfully, flexibly, and interoperably. I will continue to argue this, and to advocate its wider adoption.

So far, so good.

The problem, I contend, comes when well-meaning and knowledgeable advocates of both Linked Data and RDF conflate the two and infer, imply or assert that ‘Linked Data’ can only be Linked Data if expressed in RDF.

This dogmatism makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I find myself unable to agree with the underlying premise.

The rest of this post attempts to explain why, hopefully more lucidly than I or those with whom I was debating managed on Friday evening via the largely unsuitable medium of the 140 character tweet.

Andy Powell started things off lucidly enough on Friday, asking;

“is there an agreed name for an approach that adopts the 4 principles of #linkeddata minus the phrase, ‘using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)’ ??”

I was amongst those to respond, suggesting as I usually do that;

“well, personally, I’d argue that Linked Data does NOT require that phrase. But I know others disagree…  ”

Other pieces of that conversation can be extracted from the stream; start by scrolling to the bottom, find Andy’s tweet, and work back toward the top.

It’s worth noting that two of those arguing most vehemently against me were former colleagues Ian Davis and Leigh Dodds. I have massive respect for the technical prowess of both (which is certainly greater than my own), and have learned a great deal from Ian in particular over the years that we have known one another. This issue, though, is one on which we have long disagreed, and it was interesting to see the subject of many a difference of opinion in the bars of various conference hotels spill into this public arena.

Anyway, now let me try to explain what I meant.

Perhaps the most commonly cited definition for Linked Data is the one to which Andy was referring; Sir Tim Berners-Lee‘s Linked Data – Design Issues document. It’s worth noting that this document is clearly flagged (in the current version amended on 18 June 2009, at least) as being both a ‘personal view only’ and ‘imperfect but published.’ So a very long way from being a ‘standard,’ ‘specification,’ or ‘definition,’ but certainly still a pretty good starting point, and one to which I often direct clients and others.

Berners-Lee begins,

“The Semantic Web isn’t just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data.  With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.”

(my emphasis)

That sounds good, doesn’t it? Indeed, we talked about that on the Linked Data panel I moderated at the recent Semantic Technology Conference, and I’ve embedded the video here.

It is the next section of Berners-Lee’s document that is used to validate the view that Linked Data needs RDF;

“1. Use URIs as names for things

2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names

3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)

4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

(my emphasis)”

On one reading, an unambiguous validation of the view with which I disagree. On another, a suggestion of best practice, expressed as part of a ‘personal view’ with which we are perfectly entitled to take issue.

Would the zealots be calmed by the simple insertion of ‘preferably’ or ‘ideally,’ immediately after point three’s second comma? Maybe. Or perhaps the fires of Linked Data’s self-appointed Inquisition would be stoked for Berners-Lee himself.

Talk of Linked Data, Open Data, the Web of Data and related concepts in recent years have led to a quite remarkable shift in attitude amongst individuals, public bodies and private corporations. Almost everywhere my work takes me, clever people are seriously grappling with the implications of consuming from or contributing to these emerging ecosystems. Not all of their questions have good answers, and not all of the technological, strategic and business implications have necessarily been fully worked through. But these people are asking the questions, and they are asking them in all seriousness.That is a dramatic and welcome shift.

Some, such as the BBC, Thomson Reuters and the UK Government’s Central Office of Information are sufficiently persuaded of the benefits to take risks and to open the previously closed in taking a lead. Others will follow, as fears are assuaged, doubts eased, and benefits realised.

Despite this undoubted progress, the green shoots of a Linked Data ecology remain delicate. By moving from a message that stresses the value of unambiguous and web-addressable naming (HTTP URIs), providing ‘useful information,’ and enabling people to ‘discover more things’ by linking toward a message that elevates one of the best mechanisms (RDF) for achieving this to become the only permissible approach, we do the broader aims great harm.

Yes, those already in the club will probably be very pleased with the purity and functionality of the toys in their playground. But they will have barred a far larger group with data to share, a willingness to learn, and an enthusiasm to engage. At best, they will have slowed the growth of the pool of Linked Data quite dramatically. At worst, they will have created an increasingly irrelevant backwater that more pragmatic people will simply route around. Perhaps, in their pragmatism, those people will now never look seriously at RDF and its power, scared away by the fervour of those who sought to elevate it too high, and too fast.

What are we after? More Linked Data, or more RDF? I sincerely hope it’s the former.

So let’s see loads more Linked Data, and plenty of evangelism as to why RDF could be the best way to do it. But let’s not ostracise the vast majority of potential participants, contributors and beneficiaries in the world of Linked Data, just because they haven’t wholeheartedly embraced RDF yet.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care (readwriteweb.com)
• Nodalities (Talis): Ivan Herman talks about the Semantic Web and W3C (blogs.talis.com)
• ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 1: Linked Data (readwriteweb.com)
• Linking bbc.co.uk to the Linked Data cloud (derivadow.com)
• Tim Berners-Lee: “We need data on the Web to work better together” (semantic-web.at)
• What does the history of the web tell us about its future? (derivadow.com)
• Tim Berners-Lee’s Eloquent Ted Speech on Linked Data (byronmiller.typepad.com)
• Sir Tim, the web and silos (bbc.co.uk)
• Talis Connected Commons: Linked open data repository opens up shop (mndoci.com)
• Jeff Pollock talks about his new book, The Semantic Web for Dummies (blogs.talis.com)
• CNET Partners with Thomson Reuters on Linked Data Initiative (readwriteweb.com)
• ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 2: Search Engines, User Interfaces for Data, Wolfram Alpha, And More… (readwriteweb.com)
• How Open is ‘Open’ ? (cloudofdata.com)
• Crossref, OpenURL and more Linked Data Heresy (go-to-hellman.blogspot.com)

There has been a recent burst of enthusiasm for making raw data produced by and for Government more ‘open,’ and this must surely be welcomed. Long-running grass-roots efforts such as Tom Steinberg’s mySociety and The Guardian‘s Free Our Data campaign continue to innovate, but in an environment that is suddenly more receptive to their ideas. Edge-case adoptions of RDFa and other ‘semantic’ specifications, perhaps, are at last moving from being merely the preserve of a few isolated enthusiasts.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee now walks the corridors of power in London and Washington and elected officials (and even the Opposition parties) at least claim to be listening to his call for ‘Raw Data, Now!’ and his talk of Linked Data, URIs, and the rest. How far we have come, but we have much further still to go.

‘Open’ and ‘Transparent’ Government is nothing new. It’s been talked about for a very long time, and there has been some progress. Part of the issue, I think, comes down to interpretations of ‘open.’ Just because it’s possible to download some Government data doesn’t necessarily mean it’s practical for most interested parties to do so.

If a national library puts all of its catalogue online for free, but requires you to query it via an obscure industry protocol, is that ‘open’ ? If they then throttle access so that it would take an inordinately long period of time to ‘copy’ their catalogue, is that ‘open’ ?

If a National Statistics agency makes all of their research freely available, and provides access to thousands of opaquely named csv files by listing them on a web page, is that ‘open’ ?

If a Government department makes all its research reports available online as Microsoft Word files, is that ‘open’ ?

A purist might strenuously assert that none of these are ‘open.’ Most, certainly, are far from ideal… but they still serve a real purpose in making the innards of Government more accountable. How good should be good enough in 2009?

Going the other way, does a Health Authority have to make my medical records visible to the world before it can be called ‘open’ ? It seems almost unthinkable, but extremes of viewpoint do have an annoying habit of quickly becoming that absurd.

The current enthusiasm for ‘Open’ is closely associated to Tim Berners-Lee’s talk of Linked Data and the newly pragmatic Semantic Web, and Berners-Lee provided a short note last week on his current views. Contrast Tim’s discussion of the ways in which Government data should be linkable with the Sunlight Foundation’s attack on the US Federal Government‘s transparency flagship, Recovery.gov, for not making any real data available in the first place.

If we can’t even get the existing raw data out of Government as often as we’d like, there’s a long way to go before Berners-Lee’s grander vision can be achieved. He recognises this, of course, writing;

“Government data is being put online to increase accountability, contribute valuable information about the world, and to enable government, the country, and the world to function more efficiently. All of these purposes are served by putting the information on the Web as Linked Data. Start with the ‘low-hanging fruit’. Whatever else, the raw data should be made available as soon as possible. Preferably, it should be put up as Linked Data. As a third priority, it should be linked to other sources. As a lower priority, nice user interfaces should be made to it — if interested communities outside government have not already done it.”

(my emphasis)

To get much further, and to make that progress sustainable, there’s a requirement for a very real shift in attitudes at the heart of Government. Openness (of data or anything else) shouldn’t be a tactic to distract from worse news elsewhere, or a short lived knee-jerk response to the latest embarrassment. Rather, it should be a deep-seated presumption to underpin policy, systems design and more.

Data from Government should, quite simply, be freely and easily available. As a matter of course, and without prevarication. Unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise.

For all the talk of ‘open,’ that is very far from being true today. The presumption is ‘closed.’ The mindset is (largely) ‘closed.’ ‘Open’ has to be fought for, and ‘Open’ has to be justified. ‘Open’ has to be championed, endlessly, tirelessly, thanklessly.

The exact opposite should be true. Then (and maybe only then?) Berners-Lee and his colleagues can build something wonderful.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Open government and Linked Data; now it’s time to draft… (johnbreslin.com)
• Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks to the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones about Linked Data (cloudofdata.com)
• A World Where Everybody Has Put their Data on the Web (futurechat.in)
• Happy 20th Birthday, World Wide Web (readwriteweb.com)
• Linked Data in Health Care (ehealth.johnwsharp.com)
• Sir Tim, the web and silos (bbc.co.uk)
• SemTech2009 impressions (ivan-herman.name)
• Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care (readwriteweb.com)
• Reflections on SemTech 2009 (w3.org)
• UK Government Moves to Put Data on the Web (w3.org)
• Tim Berners-Lee: “We need data on the Web to work better together” (semantic-web.at)
• Talis Connected Commons: Linked open data repository opens up shop (mndoci.com)
• Happy Birthday, Web of Documents. Now bring on the Web of Data! (cloudofdata.com)

There has been some coverage of the recent announcement by UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be helping the UK Government to make more of its data available for use and reuse. Charles Arthur at the Guardian was quick off the mark, and the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones followed through with an interesting telephone conversation, the full content of which is now available.

“So that government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I [Gordon Brown] have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee who led the creation of the world wide web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming month.”

The ‘coming month’? Singular??? That’s definitely what the transcript says…

Readers of this blog will be no strangers to Berners-Lee, the Linked Data movement, or the opportunities to apply some of its ideas to mainstream applications in the public and private sectors.

It’s good to see the mainstream attention. Now all we have to do is make the most of opportunities like this (and similar initiatives emerging from the Obama administration) to deliver on the promise.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Web creator job ‘beyond politics’ (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Tim BernersLee: internet could help combat climate change and cancer (telegraph.co.uk)
• Web founder looks to big changes (news.bbc.co.uk)
• TED2009: Tim Berners-Lee (boingboing.net)
• Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care (readwriteweb.com)
• Linked data will change health care (ourownsystem.com)
• A World Where Everybody Has Put their Data on the Web (futurechat.in)

Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee prepared the CERN memo that built upon existing principles such as hypertext and  — eighteen months later — gave birth to the World Wide Web.

This Web of Documents has exceeded most people’s wildest expectations since reaching mainstream awareness on the back of graphical tools such as the Mosaic web browser, but the data behind so many decisions, analyses and visualisations largely remains inaccessible even today.

Berners-Lee spoke at TED last month, and I wrote about it at the time. ReadWriteWeb has an article today that includes the video of that presentation, which should also be in the TED archive later today.

In his talk, Berners-Lee describes the notion of Linked Data and attempts to illustrate the advances that could be made if we were all able to contribute and consume data in the same way that we do today with documents, images, and the like. He refers to the visually compelling work of Hans Rosling (with whom I recorded a podcast last year), and suggests that more data will enable more (and hopefully better) such analysis.

The principles behind this notion of Linked Data are simple in the extreme, and a growing community of enthusiasts is already at work to make ever-more data visible.

This is not some ‘new’ Web; not a replacement for the Web of today. Rather, it’s an evolution of today’s Web that makes today’s applications and interactions richer and more capable, whilst laying the foundations for services as yet unimagined.

Watch Tim’s talk, wish the Web a Happy Birthday, then get on and do your bit.

Raw Data, Now!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Linked data will change health care (ourownsystem.com)
• TED2009: Tim Berners-Lee (boingboing.net)
• Tim Berners-Lee: Linked data (thenumerati.net)
• Tim Berners-Lee: Raw Data Now (ethanzuckerman.com)

The audience is senior, and easily one of the most engaged I’ve come across for a while. After a ten minute grace period, presenters are pelted with questions and comments, and I’ve only seen a couple get all the way through their prepared slides. It’s refreshing to see attendees making sure they get what they want, rather than listening semi-soporifically to one prepared pitch after another. It should also be good for the speaker, as at least they’re having the audience engage. I say that now. Let’s see if I still think so after my grilling!

My fellow speakers are drawn from a range of backgrounds, and include Russ Daniels, HP’s VP for Cloud Services Strategy, Greg Papadopoulos, Sun’s CTO, Vishal Sikka, SAP’s CTO, and Doug Cutting, Yahoo!’s Project Lead on Hadoop.

Related articles by Zemanta

• TED2009: Tim Berners-Lee (boingboing.net)
• HP Confines the Cloud for Enterprises (gigaom.com)
• Linked Data and the Enterprise: a viable two-way street (cloudofdata.com)

I am travelling to San Diego next week to speak about the importance of evolving Enterprise attitudes to data. Borrowing some nice turns of phrase from Sir Tim Berners-Lee‘s recent TED talk and JP Rangaswami‘s keynote to Powered by Cloud, amongst other things I’ll be suggesting that they ‘stop hugging their data’ and move ‘from data centre to data centric.’

The Linked Data initiative, which began in March of 2007 as a community project supported by W3C‘s Semantic Web Education & Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group (of which I was a member), has been a huge success. Described by Berners-Lee as ‘the Web done right,’ the notion of Linked Data rests upon the acceptance of four simple principles, yet opens the door to previously unanticipated re-use of data scattered across the Web.

The most rapid adoption has, unsurprisingly, been seen in terms of liberally licensed data already visible on the Web in some form. DBpedia, for example, is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and expose the individual facts for use across the Web. There have also been examples — as always justified by hacker mentality, ‘academic freedom,’ the imprimatur of ‘research,’ or the expectation that the perpetrators are ‘too small’ to be noticed — in which data have been appropriated to the cause without due care and attention to the rights of the data owner, but these isolated cases should certainly not detract from the value of the broader effort.

Public Interest data from organisations such as the BBC has also begun to appear in the ‘Linked Data Cloud‘ (click on individual data sets for more),  and the frequency and strength of reciprocal links between participating resources grows rapidly.

Enterprise data is effectively invisible to this Cloud, which brings me back to Andreas’ first post. In it, he asks;

“Since the [Linked Data] cloud is kind of the basic infrastructure which drives the whole process – this layer should remain a freely accessible one. But how could new business models be built on top of it (and constantly spend money on maintaining and extending the underlying infrastructure)?

Where could enterprises start using Linked Data? Only by retrieving data from the ‘outside’ and mash it up with the ‘inside’ – only one way?”

I can certainly see cases in which cautious corporates will be willing to consume without contributing in return, and there’s clearly work to do in demonstrating the value that they could gain from more balanced participation; participation that should never mean unwillingly ‘giving away’ competitive advantage or sensitive data.

We have an annoying tendency to view data in our databases as an indivisible mass, vigorously and unthinkingly applying the same (expensive) protections to an uninteresting and low-value factoid of underlying context as we do to the core attributes of our next big lead.

Andreas concludes this post by suggesting something very similar to JP Rangaswami’s notion of ‘data centric’;

“Information has no ‘place’ anymore, energy can’t be shipped around the world. We should rethink the meaning of a ‘data store’ and information will flow without flooding us. Linked Data might become the essence.”

Andreas’ second post followed after he’d listened to the most recent episode of the Semantic Web Gang, which I Chair. During the show, recorded last month, we discussed the latest release from Thomson Reuters‘ Open Calais activity, which sees it embrace Linked Data’s principles whilst continuing to run and grow a viable global business.

Andreas extrapolates from the conversation to suggest that a viable business model for the data-curating Enterprise might be to expose timely and accurate enrichments to the Linked Data ecosystem; enrichments that customers might pay a premium to access more quickly or in more convenient forms than are available for free. He also sees a market for application builders that optimise the flow of information, and both of these are certainly possible.

The Linked Data — the Data Web — opportunity is far greater, though, and too little attention is being devoted to it by Linked Data’s advocates as they concentrate their efforts on big public datasets of the sort Berners-Lee discussed in Long Beach last week. Big public data sets are important, and Berners-Lee is right to suggest that more Open and Linked access to the outputs of scholarship will help in our efforts to tackle many of the world’s ills. There’s as much value locked up inside our commercial enterprises too, though, and yet the rationale that will ultimately lead to us unlocking this is quite different.

It is that rationale which we need to get right, almost certainly without mentioning ‘RDF’, ‘Semantic Web,’ or even ‘Open.’

And if you’re in Southern California next week too, why not come and say ‘Hi’…?

‘Sunrise over San Diego‘ image © Alon Banks, 2007

Related articles by Zemanta

• TED2009: Tim Berners-Lee (boingboing.net)
• Linked data will change health care (ourownsystem.com)
• The Semantic Web in Action (sciam.com)
• Tim Berners-Lee: Linked data (thenumerati.net)
• Building coherence at bbc.co.uk (blogs.talis.com)
• Calais 4.0 Released: Linked Data Meets the Commercial Web (readwriteweb.com)
• Calais Release 4 and the Linking Data cloud… (ivanherman.wordpress.com)