The (near) future of data is linked
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2025 4:13 am
Three blocks from the office, Lisa’s phone buzzes with a new alert: High correlation detected.
She races back to her desk and inhales the auto-generated report. She can’t believe it found something this quickly. Is it a mistake? Just this morning she uploaded her dataset, the product of three long months spent sampling and compiling data from 50,000 leukemia patients in the US.
Scrolling through the report Lisa sees the boundaries of one cancer cluster line up almost perfectly with a table in a dataset about the geographic distribution of avocado orchards. No, not a mistake. This is real. And that’s not the only link.
Lisa’s fingers trace two trend lines across her monitor in disbelief. One line represents the number of media references to a rare fungus ravaging avocado trees. The other line is from her own leukemia diagnosis data. Same geography. Same date range. They trend upward at exactly the same rate.
Serendipitous connections happen when data exists in an interlinked network.
Just as the World Wide Web connects documents, which contain information rendered in human-readable natural languages, the web of the future will connect data.
be browsing the web.
There’s a place for everyone in this evolution. Some will prefer to understand the underlying technologies (RDF, SPARQL, and OWL are all worth learning if you want to get ahead of it). Many more will experience Linked Data through the familiar language and patterns used by mainstream data workers. More still will benefit from Linked Data without knowing anything about it, just like you’re not thinking about the array of technologies that make it possible to read this very sentence.
The dream of Linked Data will crystalize while the technology fades into the background, just as it should. And once again, a decades-old idea will quietly change the world.
Concepts described in machine-readable datasets will link to other data via common references — just as web pages are connected by hyperlinks, the navigable references to other pages. People and machines will follow these connections as easily as we browse the web today.
Put another way:
The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the canada whatsapp number data interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.
– Semantic Web Activity Page
This isn’t a futuristic fantasy.
That quote? It’s from 2001. Linked Data, or the Semantic Web, both refer to the same basic concept: we can connect data using the same architecture that powers the web. The technology has had extensive academic R&D over the last couple decades, and is already successfully deployed within large organizations that amass huge data assets — Google’s Knowledge Graph and Goldman Sachs’s Data Lake are examples of companies harnessing the power of linked data within private networks.
The push to apply this technology to the entire web isn’t exactly a fringe movement, either:
When you connect data together, you get power in a way that doesn’t happen just with the web, with documents.
– Sir Tim Berners-Lee (from a 2009 TED talk).
She races back to her desk and inhales the auto-generated report. She can’t believe it found something this quickly. Is it a mistake? Just this morning she uploaded her dataset, the product of three long months spent sampling and compiling data from 50,000 leukemia patients in the US.
Scrolling through the report Lisa sees the boundaries of one cancer cluster line up almost perfectly with a table in a dataset about the geographic distribution of avocado orchards. No, not a mistake. This is real. And that’s not the only link.
Lisa’s fingers trace two trend lines across her monitor in disbelief. One line represents the number of media references to a rare fungus ravaging avocado trees. The other line is from her own leukemia diagnosis data. Same geography. Same date range. They trend upward at exactly the same rate.
Serendipitous connections happen when data exists in an interlinked network.
Just as the World Wide Web connects documents, which contain information rendered in human-readable natural languages, the web of the future will connect data.
be browsing the web.
There’s a place for everyone in this evolution. Some will prefer to understand the underlying technologies (RDF, SPARQL, and OWL are all worth learning if you want to get ahead of it). Many more will experience Linked Data through the familiar language and patterns used by mainstream data workers. More still will benefit from Linked Data without knowing anything about it, just like you’re not thinking about the array of technologies that make it possible to read this very sentence.
The dream of Linked Data will crystalize while the technology fades into the background, just as it should. And once again, a decades-old idea will quietly change the world.
Concepts described in machine-readable datasets will link to other data via common references — just as web pages are connected by hyperlinks, the navigable references to other pages. People and machines will follow these connections as easily as we browse the web today.
Put another way:
The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the canada whatsapp number data interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.
– Semantic Web Activity Page
This isn’t a futuristic fantasy.
That quote? It’s from 2001. Linked Data, or the Semantic Web, both refer to the same basic concept: we can connect data using the same architecture that powers the web. The technology has had extensive academic R&D over the last couple decades, and is already successfully deployed within large organizations that amass huge data assets — Google’s Knowledge Graph and Goldman Sachs’s Data Lake are examples of companies harnessing the power of linked data within private networks.
The push to apply this technology to the entire web isn’t exactly a fringe movement, either:
When you connect data together, you get power in a way that doesn’t happen just with the web, with documents.
– Sir Tim Berners-Lee (from a 2009 TED talk).