Since this is my first post to Nodalities I thought I would write about some of the themes I plan to cover in the coming months.

One of my key interests is the fostering of a web of data built on the foundations of the document-oriented web that we have today. The Web 2.0 movement of the past couple of years has made great strides in exposing some of the social and technical requirements that are necessary for the web of data to thrive: social models for data creation that exploit the network effect; intentional data exposure for recombination and consumption; agreement on common data formats; addressability of data; pervasive networking.

The most successful Web 2.0 services exhibit all of these characteristics but I think there are some missing pieces that would make the web of data closer to reality. There needs to be agreement, not only on the format of the data, but on the common entities used in the data. This doesn’t mean adoption of a single schema across all systems, but there needs to be a way to cross-reference one system’s concept of a user with another’s. I think one way to do that is for RDF to provide the linkage of concepts, using it to declaratively state how different data from different systems can be mapped. We’re doing this already in our Silkworm Directory where we associate interfaces used by search services to one another despite their different syntaxes. This lets us provide a uniform search interface across dozens of different types of search software.

Another missing piece of the puzzle is licencing of the data. A quick survey of the existing Web 2.0 services shows a distinct lack of clarity around the terms of use of the data even though the efforts of the Creative Commons has done wonders for the availability of creative works. We’re addressing that too, but there is still much to do to.

The Web 2.0 companies are at the bleeding edge of innovation and moving ahead rapidly. For the web of data to become a reality we need to help more mainstream companies and institutions catch the slipstream and adopt these practices. However, there are huge technical barriers to overcome for these organisations in the areas of data storage, management and distribution. Most understand their requirements for managing data when the audience is limited to their own employees or members, but opening more than a few web pages up to the general public is an unknown quantity. Tasks ranging from serving thousands of concurrent requests rather than low single figures to managing security and integrity of hugely participative systems are complex, expensive and foreign territory for most IT departments. Bringing the benefits of the web of data to these organisations is a huge challenge. We think the best way is to offer a platform for data sharing and to lead by example, gradually demonstrating the advantages of breaking open silos of data and of enabling users to participate deeply in the process. There’s a long, winding road ahead but it’s going to be huge amount of fun walking it!

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Talis, Participation, RDF, Web of Data

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