For this final podcast in the Online Information Conference 2009 series, I caught up with Dame Wendy Hall in a very echoey room at the Royal Society in London.

Wendy is sharing the opening keynote session on the first day of the conference with Nigel Shadbolt.  Their session has the title The Semantic Web Revolution – Unleashing the world’s most valuable information.  This promises to be a great session to catch with a combination of slide-backed presentation, conversation, and Q&A.

In this conversation with Wendy, we explore the approaching step-change evolution that Semantic Web technologies, specifically Linked Data, will  bring to the online world over the next few years.  An evolution to the web that is already in place, not the totally disruptive revolution that the web itself was.  Wendy makes it clear that, as with the document web of the mid nineties prior to the emergence of Google for instance, it is difficult to predict how the data web will turn out and what tools, services, and business models will emerge.  Nevertheless, the opportunities for innovation, building on the unleashing of distributed yet interlinked data, will be massive.

An interesting insight in to the thinking that will underpin what promises to be a great opening session to an equally good conference.