I encourage everyone to view Hans Rosling’s amazing presentations, this one showing his new insights into world poverty and life made in Monterey, California in 2007. His worked exemplifies the kinds for presentations that should be available to everyone via the web if Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data becomes a reality. Currently, you can find all sorts of data on the web but information you can use is not so readily available. His idea is that everything, not just the conventional web pages, should have an address. For example, there should be a page containing data about you as an individual not just your pictures, games, and random thoughts but real data with statistics. This could contain the places you have lived, your credentials, work progress, earnings, family information, etc. but further those individual pieces of information should be available with or without information about you. Being able to disaggregate this data from your page allows anyone to create on the web or from the web information about the average credentials of people in your state, how people of your ethnicity move through jobs, etc.
The implications for educators are that we can our students get useful data on the web. Perhaps without subscriptions to specialized databases our students can get relevant, accurate, and reputable data. Perhaps we then shift from discouraging research on the web general to teaching our students how to select the most appropriate data for their work.
Currently, Linked data has a PR problem. Berners-Lee who is always visionary is not always the best candidate to express his own vision. He has expressed the concept at several venues over the last couple of years but so few organizations and individuals understand and have embraced the concept. Berners-Lee stated that his employer ignored his idea for hypertext markup language. We cannot afford to miss what he is saying now.
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