News Story

Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Linked Data and the Future Internet

John Domingue, Monday 20 Dec 2010

Today saw the closing ceremony for the latest Future Internet Assembly held in Ghent (FIA Ghent). KMi’s was strongly represented in the Future Internet work via by two projects: SOA4All and SOFI, and most significantly through our leadership of the Future Internet Working Group for the Software and Services Unit. The Future Internet Assemblies are 6-monthly gatherings of the leaders of 150 EU projects with a combined budget approaching 1 billion Euros to discuss issues related to the design of a new global communications network. One of the most interesting cross-domain sessions was on the relationship between Linked Data and the Future Internet which featured a keynote from Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In his presentation he covered how semantics allows one to choose an appropriate scale-of-consensus in sharing viewpoints across audiences of different sizes and future work on a read/write Web of Data. Other presentations of note included current and future use of Linked Data from Google and also Peter Mika and Ricardo Baeza-Yates of Yahoo! on Linked Data and next generation search based on wisdom of the crowds. It is also important to note that John Domingue is chief editor of the next Future Internet Assembly book to be published by Springer; and will be helping to frame up the direction of this work through 2011.