The public sector doesn’t always embrace transparency and change. Nevertheless, some governments have taken the lead in promoting Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the new web—a web composed of visible, exposed and linked data.
What is Linked Data?
Linking data involves exposing data: publishing it and making it accessible. In Berners-Lee’s vision, publishing data online per evolving publishing standards permits formerly invisible (i.e. public, but virtually impossible to access) and propriety data to be linked with other data.
This will spur the development of new web applications and capabilities. It will transform the way we work and learn, achieving a scale will likely precipitate a sustained innovation-binge. For one thing, linking data effectively dissolves research silos. This has already been demonstrated in the case of the life sciences, whose own linked data forms a core region of the linked-data web. Secondly, just as with the brain, new links between information equal capacity for new insights and new approaches to old problems.
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