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Time flies.

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It's actually almost 20 years ago

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when I wanted to reframe the way we use information,

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the way we work together: I invented the World Wide Web.

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Now, 20 years on, at TED,

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I want to ask your help in a new reframing.

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So going back to 1989,

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I wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system.

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Nobody really did anything with it, pretty much.

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But 18 months later -- this is how innovation happens --

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18 months later, my boss said I could do it on the side,

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as a sort of a play project,

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kick the tires of a new computer we'd got.

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And so he gave me the time to code it up.

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So I basically roughed out what HTML should look like:

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hypertext protocol, HTTP;

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the idea of URLs, these names for things

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which started with HTTP.

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I wrote the code and put it out there.

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Why did I do it?

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Well, it was basically frustration.

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I was frustrated -- I was working as a software engineer

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in this huge, very exciting lab,

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lots of people coming from all over the world.

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They brought all sorts of different computers with them.

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They had all sorts of different data formats,

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all sorts, all kinds of documentation systems.

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So that, in all that diversity,

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if I wanted to figure out how to build something

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out of a bit of this and a bit of this,

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everything I looked into, I had to connect to some new machine,

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I had to learn to run some new program,

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I would find the information I wanted in some new data format.

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And these were all incompatible.

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It was just very frustrating.

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The frustration was all this unlocked potential.

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In fact, on all these discs there were documents.

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So if you just imagined them all

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being part of some big, virtual documentation system in the sky,

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say on the Internet,

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then life would be so much easier.

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Well, once you've had an idea like that it kind of gets under your skin

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and even if people don't read your memo --

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actually he did, it was found after he died, his copy.

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He had written, "Vague, but exciting," in pencil, in the corner.

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(Laughter)

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But in general it was difficult -- it was really difficult to explain

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what the web was like.

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It's difficult to explain to people now that it was difficult then.

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But then -- OK, when TED started, there was no web

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so things like "click" didn't have the same meaning.

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I can show somebody a piece of hypertext,

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a page which has got links,

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and we click on the link and bing -- there'll be another hypertext page.

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Not impressive.

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You know, we've seen that -- we've got things on hypertext on CD-ROMs.

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What was difficult was to get them to imagine:

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so, imagine that that link could have gone

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to virtually any document you could imagine.

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Alright, that is the leap that was very difficult for people to make.

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Well, some people did.

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So yeah, it was difficult to explain, but there was a grassroots movement.

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And that is what has made it most fun.

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That has been the most exciting thing,

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not the technology, not the things people have done with it,

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but actually the community, the spirit of all these people

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getting together, sending the emails.

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That's what it was like then.

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Do you know what? It's funny, but right now it's kind of like that again.

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I asked everybody, more or less, to put their documents --

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I said, "Could you put your documents on this web thing?"

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And you did.

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Thanks.

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It's been a blast, hasn't it?

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I mean, it has been quite interesting

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because we've found out that the things that happen with the web

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really sort of blow us away.

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They're much more than we'd originally imagined

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when we put together the little, initial website

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that we started off with.

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Now, I want you to put your data on the web.

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Turns out that there is still huge unlocked potential.

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There is still a huge frustration

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that people have because we haven't got data on the web as data.

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What do you mean, "data"? What's the difference -- documents, data?

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Well, documents you read, OK?

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More or less, you read them, you can follow links from them, and that's it.

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Data -- you can do all kinds of stuff with a computer.

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Who was here or has otherwise seen Hans Rosling's talk?

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One of the great -- yes a lot of people have seen it --

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one of the great TED Talks.

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Hans put up this presentation

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in which he showed, for various different countries, in various different colors --

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he showed income levels on one axis

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and he showed infant mortality, and he shot this thing animated through time.

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So, he'd taken this data and made a presentation

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which just shattered a lot of myths that people had

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about the economics in the developing world.

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He put up a slide a little bit like this.

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It had underground all the data

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OK, data is brown and boxy and boring,

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and that's how we think of it, isn't it?

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Because data you can't naturally use by itself

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But in fact, data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives

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and it happens because somebody takes that data and does something with it.

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In this case, Hans had put the data together

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he had found from all kinds of United Nations websites and things.

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He had put it together,

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combined it into something more interesting than the original pieces

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and then he'd put it into this software,

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which I think his son developed, originally,

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and produces this wonderful presentation.

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And Hans made a point

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of saying, "Look, it's really important to have a lot of data."

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And I was happy to see that at the party last night

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that he was still saying, very forcibly, "It's really important to have a lot of data."

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So I want us now to think about

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not just two pieces of data being connected, or six like he did,

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but I want to think about a world where everybody has put data on the web

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and so virtually everything you can imagine is on the web

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and then calling that linked data.

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The technology is linked data, and it's extremely simple.

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If you want to put something on the web there are three rules:

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first thing is that those HTTP names --

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those things that start with "http:" --

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we're using them not just for documents now,

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we're using them for things that the documents are about.

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We're using them for people, we're using them for places,

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we're using them for your products, we're using them for events.

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All kinds of conceptual things, they have names now that start with HTTP.

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Second rule, if I take one of these HTTP names and I look it up

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and I do the web thing with it and I fetch the data

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using the HTTP protocol from the web,

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I will get back some data in a standard format

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which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know

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about that thing, about that event.

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Who's at the event? Whatever it is about that person,

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where they were born, things like that.

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So the second rule is I get important information back.

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Third rule is that when I get back that information

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it's not just got somebody's height and weight and when they were born,

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it's got relationships.

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Data is relationships.

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Interestingly, data is relationships.

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This person was born in Berlin; Berlin is in Germany.

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And when it has relationships, whenever it expresses a relationship

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then the other thing that it's related to

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is given one of those names that starts HTTP.

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So, I can go ahead and look that thing up.

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So I look up a person -- I can look up then the city where they were born; then

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I can look up the region it's in, and the town it's in,

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and the population of it, and so on.

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So I can browse this stuff.

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So that's it, really.

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That is linked data.

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I wrote an article entitled "Linked Data" a couple of years ago

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and soon after that, things started to happen.

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The idea of linked data is that we get lots and lots and lots

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of these boxes that Hans had,

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and we get lots and lots and lots of things sprouting.

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It's not just a whole lot of other plants.

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It's not just a root supplying a plant,

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but for each of those plants, whatever it is --

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a presentation, an analysis, somebody's looking for patterns in the data --

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they get to look at all the data

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and they get it connected together,

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and the really important thing about data

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is the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is.

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So, linked data.

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The meme went out there.

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And, pretty soon Chris Bizer at the Freie Universitat in Berlin

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who was one of the first people to put interesting things up,

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he noticed that Wikipedia --

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you know Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia

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with lots and lots of interesting documents in it.

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Well, in those documents, there are little squares, little boxes.

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And in most information boxes, there's data.

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So he wrote a program to take the data, extract it from Wikipedia,

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and put it into a blob of linked data

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on the web, which he called dbpedia.

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Dbpedia is represented by the blue blob in the middle of this slide

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and if you actually go and look up Berlin,

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you'll find that there are other blobs of data

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which also have stuff about Berlin, and they're linked together.

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So if you pull the data from dbpedia about Berlin,

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you'll end up pulling up these other things as well.

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And the exciting thing is it's starting to grow.

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This is just the grassroots stuff again, OK?

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Let's think about data for a bit.

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Data comes in fact in lots and lots of different forms.

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Think of the diversity of the web. It's a really important thing

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that the web allows you to put all kinds of data up there.

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So it is with data. I could talk about all kinds of data.

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We could talk about government data, enterprise data is really important,

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there's scientific data, there's personal data,

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there's weather data, there's data about events,

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there's data about talks, and there's news and there's all kinds of stuff.

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I'm just going to mention a few of them

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so that you get the idea of the diversity of it,

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so that you also see how much unlocked potential.

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Let's start with government data.

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Barack Obama said in a speech,

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that he -- American government data would be available on the Internet

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in accessible formats.

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And I hope that they will put it up as linked data.

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That's important. Why is it important?

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Not just for transparency, yeah transparency in government is important,

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but that data -- this is the data from all the government departments

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Think about how much of that data is about how life is lived in America.

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It's actual useful. It's got value.

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I can use it in my company.

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I could use it as a kid to do my homework.

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So we're talking about making the place, making the world run better

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by making this data available.

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In fact if you're responsible -- if you know about some data

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in a government department, often you find that

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these people, they're very tempted to keep it --

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Hans calls it database hugging.

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You hug your database, you don't want to let it go

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until you've made a beautiful website for it.

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Well, I'd like to suggest that rather --

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yes, make a beautiful website,

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who am I to say don't make a beautiful website?

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Make a beautiful website, but first

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give us the unadulterated data,

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we want the data.

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We want unadulterated data.

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OK, we have to ask for raw data now.

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And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK?

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Can you say "raw"?

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Audience: Raw.

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Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say "data"?

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Audience: Data.

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TBL: Can you say "now"?

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Audience: Now!

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TBL: Alright, "raw data now"!

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Audience: Raw data now!

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Practice that. It's important because you have no idea the number of excuses

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people come up with to hang onto their data

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and not give it to you, even though you've paid for it as a taxpayer.

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And it's not just America. It's all over the world.

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And it's not just governments, of course -- it's enterprises as well.

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So I'm just going to mention a few other thoughts on data.

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Here we are at TED, and all the time we are very conscious

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of the huge challenges that human society has right now --

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curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer's,

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understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable,

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understanding how the world works.

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The people who are going to solve those -- the scientists --

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they have half-formed ideas in their head,

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they try to communicate those over the web.

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But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment

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is on databases, often sitting in their computers,

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and actually, currently not shared.

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In fact, I'll just go into one area --

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if you're looking at Alzheimer's, for example,

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drug discovery -- there is a whole lot of linked data which is just coming out

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because scientists in that field realize

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this is a great way of getting out of those silos,

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because they had their genomics data in one database

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in one building, and they had their protein data in another.

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Now, they are sticking it onto -- linked data --

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and now they can ask the sort of question, that you probably wouldn't ask,

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I wouldn't ask -- they would.

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What proteins are involved in signal transduction

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and also related to pyramidal neurons?

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Well, you take that mouthful and you put it into Google.

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Of course, there's no page on the web which has answered that question

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because nobody has asked that question before.

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You get 223,000 hits --

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no results you can use.

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You ask the linked data -- which they've now put together --

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32 hits, each of which is a protein which has those properties

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and you can look at.

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The power of being able to ask those questions, as a scientist --

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questions which actually bridge across different disciplines --

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is really a complete sea change.

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It's very very important.

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Scientists are totally stymied at the moment --

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the power of the data that other scientists have collected is locked up

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and we need to get it unlocked so we can tackle those huge problems.

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Now if I go on like this, you'll think that all the data comes from huge institutions

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and has nothing to do with you.

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But, that's not true.

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In fact, data is about our lives.

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You just -- you log on to your social networking site,

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your favorite one, you say, "This is my friend."

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Bing! Relationship. Data.

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You say, "This photograph, it's about -- it depicts this person. "

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Bing! That's data. Data, data, data.

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Every time you do things on the social networking site,

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the social networking site is taking data and using it -- re-purposing it --

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and using it to make other people's lives more interesting on the site.

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But, when you go to another linked data site --

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and let's say this is one about travel,

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and you say, "I want to send this photo to all the people in that group,"

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you can't get over the walls.

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The Economist wrote an article about it, and lots of people have blogged about it --

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tremendous frustration.

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The way to break down the silos is to get inter-operability

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between social networking sites.

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We need to do that with linked data.

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One last type of data I'll talk about, maybe it's the most exciting.

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Before I came down here, I looked it up on OpenStreetMap

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The OpenStreetMap's a map, but it's also a Wiki.

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Zoom in and that square thing is a theater -- which we're in right now --

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The Terrace Theater. It didn't have a name on it.

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So I could go into edit mode, I could select the theater,

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I could add down at the bottom the name, and I could save it back.

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And now if you go back to the OpenStreetMap. org,

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and you find this place, you will find that The Terrace Theater has got a name.

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I did that. Me!

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I did that to the map. I just did that!

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I put that up on there. Hey, you know what?

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If I -- that street map is all about everybody doing their bit

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and it creates an incredible resource

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because everybody else does theirs.

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And that is what linked data is all about.

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It's about people doing their bit

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to produce a little bit, and it all connecting.

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That's how linked data works.

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You do your bit. Everybody else does theirs.

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You may not have lots of data which you have yourself to put on there

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but you know to demand it.

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And we've practiced that.

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So, linked data -- it's huge.

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I've only told you a very small number of things

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There are data in every aspect of our lives,

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every aspect of work and pleasure,

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and it's not just about the number of places where data comes,

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it's about connecting it together.

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And when you connect data together, you get power

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in a way that doesn't happen just with the web, with documents.

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You get this really huge power out of it.

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So, we're at the stage now

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where we have to do this -- the people who think it's a great idea.

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And all the people -- and I think there's a lot of people at TED who do things because --

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even though there's not an immediate return on the investment

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because it will only really pay off when everybody else has done it --

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they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does things

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which would be good if everybody else did them.

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OK, so it's called linked data.

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I want you to make it.

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I want you to demand it.

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And I think it's an idea worth spreading.

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Thanks.

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(Applause)