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Good news from the Raw Data Now front. Tim Berners-Lee has been asked by Gordon Brown to help open up access to government data in the UK. Let’s hope this is not just a publicity stunt to boost Mr Brown’s plummeting popularity, but a true effort in creating a more transparent government. If this works, it should point more governments towards this direction.

In the meantime, critics in the UK point out the great obstacles such an attempt will stumble upon. BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones comments:

I fear Sir Tim may be in for a bruising few months, as he tries to convince Sir Humphrey et al to let it all hang out.

Clearly, a lot has to change in the idiosyncrasy of state officials for Sir Tim’s vision to fully come to life, but at least he’s been given this chance. Let’s just see how this goes…

Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web and the Semantic Web, talked in TED 2009 about the origin and evolution of the web. He described how he first came up with the idea of hypertext on 1989 and how difficult it was to communicate this to his boss. Fortunately, he was allowed to work on it on the side as a “play project”

He also talked passionately about the future of the web and Linked Data. He believes sharing data on the web can have so many benefits and that everyone should be contributing to this. He even engaged the audience in chanting: “Raw Data Now!”.

Watch the talk here:

The Semantic Web aims at expressing web content in machine-processable forms, so that it is maintained efficiently by software agents. In this way, the precision of search will be enhanced and logic reasoning on web data will be possible. The Semantic Web vision, as expressed by its main founder Tim Berners-Lee, is “giving information a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation”.

In the following clip, Tim Berners-Lee explains the main concepts and technologies behind the Semantic Web: