It's actually almost 20 years ago

when I wanted to reframe the way we use information,

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

Now, 20 years on, at TED,

I want to ask your help in a new reframing.

So going back to 1989,

I wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system.

Nobody really did anything with it, pretty much.

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

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

as a sort of a play project,

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

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

So I basically roughed out what HTML should look like:

hypertext protocol, HTTP;

the idea of URLs, these names for things

which started with HTTP.

I wrote the code and put it out there.

Why did I do it?

Well, it was basically frustration.

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

in this huge, very exciting lab,

lots of people coming from all over the world.

They brought all sorts of different computers with them.

They had all sorts of different data formats,

all sorts, all kinds of documentation systems.

So that, in all that diversity,

if I wanted to figure out how to build something

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

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

I had to learn to run some new program,

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

And these were all incompatible.

It was just very frustrating.

The frustration was all this unlocked potential.

In fact, on all these discs there were documents.

So if you just imagined them all

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

say on the Internet,

then life would be so much easier.

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

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

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

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

(Laughter)

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

what the web was like.

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

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

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

I can show somebody a piece of hypertext,

a page which has got links,

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

Not impressive.

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

What was difficult was to get them to imagine:

so, imagine that that link could have gone

to virtually any document you could imagine.

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

Well, some people did.

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

And that is what has made it most fun.

That has been the most exciting thing,

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

but actually the community, the spirit of all these people

getting together, sending the emails.

That's what it was like then.

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

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

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

And you did.

Thanks.

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

I mean, it has been quite interesting

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

really sort of blow us away.

They're much more than we'd originally imagined

when we put together the little, initial website

that we started off with.

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

Turns out that there is still huge unlocked potential.

There is still a huge frustration

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

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

Well, documents you read, OK?

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

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

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

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

one of the great TED Talks.

Hans put up this presentation

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

he showed income levels on one axis

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

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

which just shattered a lot of myths that people had

about the economics in the developing world.

He put up a slide a little bit like this.

It had underground all the data

OK, data is brown and boxy and boring,

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

Because data you can't naturally use by itself

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

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

In this case, Hans had put the data together

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

He had put it together,

combined it into something more interesting than the original pieces

and then he'd put it into this software,

which I think his son developed, originally,

and produces this wonderful presentation.

And Hans made a point

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

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

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

So I want us now to think about

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

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

and so virtually everything you can imagine is on the web

and then calling that linked data.

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

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

first thing is that those HTTP names --

those things that start with "http:" --

we're using them not just for documents now,

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

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

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

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

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

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

using the HTTP protocol from the web,

I will get back some data in a standard format

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

about that thing, about that event.

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

where they were born, things like that.

So the second rule is I get important information back.

Third rule is that when I get back that information

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

it's got relationships.

Data is relationships.

Interestingly, data is relationships.

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

And when it has relationships, whenever it expresses a relationship

then the other thing that it's related to

is given one of those names that starts HTTP.

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

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

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

and the population of it, and so on.

So I can browse this stuff.

So that's it, really.

That is linked data.

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

and soon after that, things started to happen.

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

of these boxes that Hans had,

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

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

It's not just a root supplying a plant,

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

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

they get to look at all the data

and they get it connected together,

and the really important thing about data

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

So, linked data.

The meme went out there.

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

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

he noticed that Wikipedia --

you know Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia

with lots and lots of interesting documents in it.

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

And in most information boxes, there's data.

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

and put it into a blob of linked data

on the web, which he called dbpedia.

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

and if you actually go and look up Berlin,

you'll find that there are other blobs of data

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

So if you pull the data from dbpedia about Berlin,

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

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

This is just the grassroots stuff again, OK?

Let's think about data for a bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm just going to mention a few of them

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

so that you also see how much unlocked potential.

Let's start with government data.

Barack Obama said in a speech,

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

in accessible formats.

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

That's important. Why is it important?

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

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

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

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

I can use it in my company.

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

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

by making this data available.

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

in a government department, often you find that

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

Hans calls it database hugging.

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

until you've made a beautiful website for it.

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

yes, make a beautiful website,

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

Make a beautiful website, but first

give us the unadulterated data,

we want the data.

We want unadulterated data.

OK, we have to ask for raw data now.

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

Can you say "raw"?

Audience: Raw.

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

Audience: Data.

TBL: Can you say "now"?

Audience: Now!

TBL: Alright, "raw data now"!

Audience: Raw data now!

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

people come up with to hang onto their data

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

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

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

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

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

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

curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer's,

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

understanding how the world works.

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

they have half-formed ideas in their head,