Tim Berners-Lee spoke about data liberation and the next web in a TedTalk and posed some excellent concepts about his blue sky scenario for the web. In short, interoperability between sites in the future will be the corner-stone for which crowd-sourcing the linking of data that is actually useful to humanity.

For example, I can tag a picture on Facebook creating a data connection between my friend’s face and their name, but I can not truly tag a piece of truly useful data between one site and another. Creating an a href link doesn’t automatically notify the recieving site that the data has been linked thus creating only a one way connection in the web without a record of the connection that was made.

Lowering the barriers between sites and barriers between humans and the data kept by organizations, enterprises and governments will provide true value to humanity from the internet. Idealistic? Yes, but if we could harness the power of the intelligence of humanity to link our data bytes together and provide access to anyone we could contexualize and visualize a fraction of our potential. Using this fraction alone would provide an unmatched value to the world as we know it.