Imagine a world where all the data on the internet is linked to it's sou...

An integral part of the World Wide Web and Tim Berners-Lee’s philosophy is being able to link to anything. With the recent 30-year anniversary of the Web, a whole host of articles and publications have recently featured Berners-Lee and his reflections on the way the web has changed. Given we are expected to produce 463 exabytes of data per day by 2025 , now is also a timely opportunity to consider the way we understand and link data online.

“Data on the web is often out of sync, out of date and out of context.”

In the age of ‘big data’, we would expect it to be at the forefront of an interconnected and linked web. In reality, data on the web is often out of sync, out of date and out of context. As soon as a number is quoted on a site away from its original source, it is removed from the context which validates its accuracy or timeliness.

When you reach any site with numbers or charts, the worst-case scenario is that you find a static number and a screen-shot of a chart. At best, there will be some kind of reference to a source, hopefully a link, allowing you to click through to the underlying data. Even if you do manage to track down the numbers making up the chart or the percentage you were looking at, it will still be a static number and a date stamped testament to history.

An example of this problem is very clear when we consider one of the most cited numbers online, a country’s population. Search any website using the ABS figure for the population of Australia, for example, and it will be date stamped and guaranteed to be inaccurate a minute after it has been posted.

Here is an example of an ABS population figure quoted on a website:

Here is the live ABS population count:

As Berners-Lee told The Guardian , he created the internet with the intent of it being “built for the public good” with the crucial aspect being that you can link to anything, raising concerns about parts of the web being locked up or centralised by corporations. Maintaining the links and ensuring data is accurately linked to the underlying source is a critical part of realising the potential of information online. When the web was created, it was built on Hypertext mark-up language and was created for hyperlinks. This worked 30 years ago when the web was document world, not a data world. In a world which relies heavily on data, it is disappointingly difficult to trace numbers back to their original source.

There are two key things which happen when we can link data to the underlying source; the actual numbers they are derived from and the formula by which they are combined are revealed. Knowing both of these helps provide the transparency to ensure anyone reading that information can make an accurate judgment of its credibility. We can start to image data as a rich tapestry of links and the possibility of future web applications allowing you to accurately trace these links.