http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Today, the Web turns 20 years old. In the TED talk embedded above, Tim Berners-Lee recalls how he invented the World Wide Web twenty years ago. It was a “play project” that his boss let him do on the side. Berners-Lee notes that the original Web was for connecting documents together online, and then argues quite eloquently why the Web now has to evolve from linked documents to linked data.

Of course, that evolution is already well under way. Just look at the explosion of APIs everywhere. The Web is becoming a massive interlinked computer, and computers need data. As more and more data becomes linked across the Web, the more that it can be accessed, analyzed, and computed. As Berners-Lee says, “Data is relationships.”