Web as platform: A web of data services

The New York Times just released an API, one for Campaign Finance. Marshall Kirkpatrick calls this significant because “steps like this are going to prove key if big media is to thrive in the future.”

To me this is another data point into something I have been thinking a lot about lately. We’ve often talked about a web of data. We’ve also talked about how data is pretty much useless until you can do something about it. This actually fits in well with my theory that raw data on it’s own doesn’t really have any value. It’s what you do with it that makes it valuable. That leads us to the next evolution of the web and the data-centric age; a web of data services. This is also the answer to the question Tom Tague asks, How will we interact with the web of data?

The NY Times providing APIs to its resource of data is the natural evolution of the web of data. Data must not be locked up. It must be made available, and we must be able to do something with it and services on the fabric of the web are the way to go and APIs enable services.

In this article on the web of data Tom Tague writes

The Web of data is the logical extension, letting developers create links between data sources that are themselves exposed on the Web for others to reuse to build large-scale, ad hoc mashups, while simultaneously reducing the challenges of integrating heterogeneous data.

The web of data services is not only about letting developers create links between data sources, but also about computing on those data sources and repurposing the data and results to provide information that if more meaningful and has greater value than the data sources individually could provide.

Tom asks what a Semantic Web browser should look like. To me it looks like a command prompt, or an IDE, where developers can leverage the services that make the data available and the services that make the methods that act on the data available to provide useful information to the end user, who then consume that information in a human readable form. Perhaps in an interactive environment that allows them to leverage some underlying canned services and pre-computed results to look at the information in a way that makes more sense to them.

We aren’t there. It will take a while, but we’ll get there. IMO, in the life sciences, the very epitome of data-driven science, we need to seriously think about data and data services, as well and methods and method services. Matt Wood talked about essentially this approach in a talk to the Informatics group at the Sanger Institute earlier this year.

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