Last Thursday, Richard MacManus, founder and editor of ReadWriteWeb, posted an interesting piece titled “Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web” where he explains how he sees the Web evolving with the three trends converging. And this morning, MacManus posted another more focused piece discussing Linked Data, where the Web allows users to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked. MacManus sums up the concept nicely: “Linked Data allows you to discover, connect to, describe, and re-use all kinds of data. It is to data what the World Wide Web was to documents back in the 90’s.” Data exists to be used, he wrote. “Linked Data enables data to be opened up and connected so that people can build interesting new things from it.”

MacManus embeds a TED presentation by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and the leading evangelist for Linked Data. Here’s a YouTube video of Berners-Lee’s TED presentation:

Several weeks ago, Berners-Lee opened “A National Dialogue” discussion on what Open Linked Data is and why it’s important, including the governmental implications.

Linked Data has great implications for federal government data, but obviously, its promise reaches far beyond the confines of government. But here at Sunlight, making government data open, online and usable is our goal. And so is connecting the dots. Last month, Sunlight Labs envisioned an OpenData.gov, the new central repository for government data and research that new federal CIO Vivek Kundra is working on. We are all eagerly awaiting to see what Vivek unveils soon. But as Berners-Lee says is his Linked Open Data mantra…”Raw Data Now!

Think of LinkedData as our one click future.