The mythical Tower of Babel represented an endeavor so great that it rivaled the heavens.  According to the bible, a united humanity speaking a single language participated in the building of the tower.  That’s the future of the world wide web envisioned by Dr. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet.

Dr. Berners-Lee in this impassioned TED talk on what he calls Linked Data describes an internet with open databases that can be linked with one another online to facilitate research and learning.  Wikipedia is perhaps a simplistic example of such an entity but at a very minute scale.

Key principles of Linked Data include:

1. Providing valuable information that is structured (or tagged) using meta data
2. The use of URIs to identify sources of information
3. Accessibility to the data by people and user agents via the HTTP protocol
4. The inclusion of links or URIs to additional, related sources of information to faciliate discovery

While it appears Dr. Lee’s vision is humanitarian in nature given he wants organizations to share their information extrinsically to the public at large this idea is valuable to corporations who implement this intrinsically.  This is founded on the principles of Data Democracy which I wrote about on the HubSpot blog sometime back.

If you have any interest in the internet I highly recommend you should watch the video to get a glimpse of the future. It’s great content and really well delivered!

Photo credit: Thomas Thomas