Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, used a talk at the Science Museum on Monday to demand more raw data.

Why? He says that governments, businesses, and international bodies are too keen to hang on to their data and turn it into a pretty website, or release it in formats that don’t enable others to extract the essence of what the data is saying. It’s a theme he has been pursuing now for some time: the Science Museum talk isn’t on the web, but a version of the same talk, from a conference in February this year, is.
 
The idea of linked data is Berners-Lee’s dream for the next stage in the development of the internet. Just as the http protocol he developed 20 years ago enabled people everywhere to share documents, he now believes that his vision of linked data will do the same for the raw data gathered by statisticians.
 
By putting it together in new ways, he says, it is possible to create something new that may not have been envisaged by those who originally collected the data. Perhaps the best example of this new approach is the brilliant presentation by Hans Rosling of the Karolinska Institute of data on world development. This is an eye-popping piece of work, available, for example, here.
 
The idea of liberating raw data may be shocking to many statisticians, who have been persuaded that they must present the figures in a form that will make them useful to their end-users. But Berners-Lee is saying that it is impossible to know who all those users will be, and that too much “database hugging” goes on by those who don’t want to let the data go until they have shaped it into a product. “We want raw data now” he said. “You’ve no idea how many excuses people come up with to hang on to data.”
 
As an example, he cited the publication of bicycle accident statistics on the Directgov website earlier this year. It took two volunteers to convert the figures into a more accessible format, and to visualise them on a map to make a product from which the public could benefit. The result, which used to be available on the Times Online website but no longer seem to be,  is a map which you can zoom into to look out for the places on your daily route where accidents have happened.