Blah Blah from The TeaBreak Team.

In the 1980s Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. This global system of hypertext documents, linked through the Internet, brought about a massive cultural shift the likes of which no-one could have imagined at that time - well maybe Tim did!

Tim Berners-Lee is currently the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He is also a senior researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab.

In this video from TED.com, Tim Berners-Lee talks about his next 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.

It is an amazing concept and one that is worth giving a lot of thought to. In this talk, Berners-Lee brings attention to the need for the sharing of raw data. He points out that “data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives … because somebody takes the data and does something with it.”

What he is asking us all to do is put our data out there on the web. It is through the sharing of data by individuals, groups, businesses and governments,  and the way this data is combined and used, that advances in science will emerge. If the past was document sharing, he says, the future is data sharing.

This cup of tea was served by: In the Line of Wire