I just finished listening to an interview of Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web (63min). Very insightful information on the future and development of the Web. The relation of web 2.0 and web 3.0, the technological development of the semantic web and privacy are some of his points, that I found mostly interesting.

He underlines the ability of the semantic web to connect data with metadata. A function, which will make our work easier, faster and therefore more productive.

It’s the connection from the data to the provenance of the data, and not just for the name of the document that it came from, but the actual properties of that - the licensing, what it’s supposed to be used for, what it’s appropriate to use it for, whether I got it because I’ve gone through an authentication process, and actually whether it’s private data, which I should not actually publish at all.

Tim Berners Lee already sees some of the most popular social networks taking advantage of semantics.

They haven’t just allowed you to tag something with somebody’s name, they’ve allowed you to capture the difference between somebody who took the photo and somebody who’s in the photo, so that the power of the reuse of the data has been much greater.

He also talks about the development level of the semantic web, saying that the technologies necessary are already there.

I think, really we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything. I suppose, really you should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realizing it’s time to just go do it.

The only piece missing from the semantic puzzle is the actual implementation of these technologies to current systems. An effort, which - according to Tim Berners Lee - is easy and financially worthwhile.

But, the thing that’s holding us up is that, there’s data which the companies have got on this, sitting and going round and round on its disks. Or it’s in their SQL systems and needs to be exported in a way that we can get at it in linked RDF as a SPARQL. And then, that could be reused.

One more remark, that drew my attention was about privacy. Tim Berners Lee advocates for openness of data - at least in a company level. He supports exposure and integration; companies should give the ability to the people to do queries on their data. This can give them a great advantage against their competition.

If a company has got this feeling where people don’t want other people in the company to know what is going on, then, it has already got a problem, this just exposes the problem.

On a more individual level he argues, that users should get hold of their data. That’s where the semantic web really diverts from the web 2.0 model. The web 2.0 model incorporates sites, which have their data and they don’t share it. The Web 3.0 gives the power back to the user

Web 2.0 is a stovepipe system. It’s a set of stovepipes where each site has got its data and it’s not sharing it. What people are sometimes calling a Web 3.0 vision where you’ve got lots of different data out there on the Web and you’ve got lots of different applications, but they’re independent.

There are much more information to be collected in this interview. This were just the stuff I found most interesting. Marshall Kirkpatrick concentrates on other subjects.

So don’t be satisfied with any short summary, listen to the actual interview or read the transcript.