In February, 2009 Sir Tim Berners-Lee spoke to TED, the Technology, Entertainment, and Design group responsible for inviting experts who, in TED's words, "are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes)". His discussion was not on web 2.0 but beyond, into a subset of the semantic web or web 3.0, that represents a sea change in the way we will obtain and view data on the web.</p>

In general, the web is currently viewed as a series of individual HTTP documents rather than as the data that make up those documents. This limits the ability to exchange information and affordably develop the applications that will move the web forward.

APIsrepresent a glimpse of the possibilities that raw-data access permits but they lack a standardized data format that is accessible by anything other than the custom applications that tap into them. This perpetuates a lack of flexibility and reduces but does not eliminate the high entry barrier that software development represents. To combat this, the W3C have developed standards for a common data format called RDF and a query language called SPARQL to access it.

The new HTTP standards define "linked data" and break through the barriers previously presented by a web which saw data as documents rather than data. Together they will conceivably enable the decentralization of application development.

What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats associated with Linked Data? Please comment below.