20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented as a researcher at CERN, the World Wide Web. Now he has a new dream: building the semantic web. In his project he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. At the TED Conference he points out, that data alone is not sufficient for using. To be useful, we should combine and share data with other data.

Berners-Lee calculates that without sharing, data serves a very limited purpose. But we should also demand that governments and businesses share the data they prepare as well, he says. Accessible raw data is his new objective for the world wide web. As he points out, "data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives… because somebody takes the data and does something with it."

The "old" web was the web of documents, the future is data sharing. In his talk he provides three points about the best practice to handle data in the web:

1. a URL should point to the data
2. anyone accessing the URL should get data back
3. relationships in the data should point to additional URLs with data

The full talk is available on TED Ideas worth spreading

And for those who are interesting in this new concept of Linked Data, here is a nice tutorial to learn the basic principles.