For this podcast in the Online Information Conference 2009 series Richard Wallis caught up with Dame Wendy Hall in a very echoey room at the Royal Society in London.

Wendy shared the opening keynote session on the first day of the conference with Nigel Shadbolt.  Their session has the title The Semantic Web Revolution – Unleashing the world’s most valuable information. 

In this conversation with Wendy, the approaching step-change evolution that Semantic Web technologies, specifically Linked Data, will  bring to the online world over the next few years is explored.  An evolution to the web that is already in place, not the totally disruptive revolution that the web itself was.  Wendy makes it clear that, as with the document web of the mid nineties prior to the emergence of Google for instance, it is difficult to predict how the data web will turn out and what tools, services, and business models will emerge.  Nevertheless, the opportunities for innovation, building on the unleashing of distributed yet interlinked data, will be massive.

Check out the full podcast and the other key presentations from a conference with around 230 exhibitors and 9000 visitors, by clicking here !