Data, data, data – the bottom line. More in this inspirational video on TED by Tim Berners Lee.

Ever wonder what makes all those mashups possible? It’s access to the huge amounts of raw data out there for people to create open source applications that we can learn from and interact with and use for our research purposes.

There’s a swarm of data out there, personal, government, economic, weather, news and still so much linked data (data with connections) is still not available to us.   Imagine if we had access to all the data in the world to play with and create super useful applications? It’s certainly something to think about.

However, the only slight problem is:

We will need tonnes of people with enough criteria to make sense of this huge amounts of information if they are made public. Unfortunately the (lack of proper) education in quite some countries is not helping (at all) in that direction. ~ Gilbert Martinez Gamote

and the semi solution to that might be:

As a programmer I get really excited about mashing up data from different sources, but what it really needs is a single application that automatically combines this data so anyone can do it, at the moment it’s still quite technical. ~ Matthew Wilcoxson

We’ve come a long way since Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web in 2009 and we’re sure to see advances in technology helping others reuse that data in a easier, less technical way.

This has everyone to do with us as data is a part of our lives Tim Berners Lee goes on to say. It’s not just huge companies and institutions that come to mind, it’s your normal human being who wants interopability between social networks on the web.

Now that’s an idea worth talking about…

Notice the cute icons before the links? Try hovering over them and you’ll get a preview too. All thanks to a nifty plugin called Apture, be sure to check that out.