Todd Watson has commented on Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s recent appearance at Lotusphere 2012. Watson writes, “How ironic that Sir Berners-Lee was speaking to the Lotusphere faithful about the open, Semantic Web on a day when so many are protesting the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, as it’s come to be known) as a means towards protecting intellectual property online… As for Berners-Lee’s message, it was both history lesson and reminder that’s what past is prologue. After Vinton Cerf invented TCP/IP to create the ‘internetwork’ of all those computers, it was Berners-Lee who figured out a way to link all those computers in a more user-friendly way (through the HTTP protocol via the WWW).”

Watson goes on, “Now, we’re moving ever closer to the Semantic Web, where not only people, but machines, can understand instructions so we’re eliminating even more friction and sharing that much more information. Berners-Lee seemed to throw a bit of a dart at the siloing of new unstructured data, like certain social networks that have walled off much of their data, but he seems bullish that the continued need to separate data from applications will differentiate the value of that data. By way of example, Berners-Lee explained that people should be able to look at the same map, on Google Maps for instance, and the separation of the GPS data from the actual application has been what’s facilitated that.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Flickr/ campuspartybrasil

Join us in June at Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco

Join us at Semantic Tech & Business Conference, June 3-7 in San Francisco, for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. Early bird prices are available. Sign up now and save!