I just watched this presentation by Tim Berners-Lee on linked data where he’s basically requesting everybody to turn the internet into one big database: RAW DATA NOW! He wants everybody to publish data on the internet, not just documents and applications. Being able to access raw data, without an application shielding it, and limiting your ways of using it, could result in some interesting information. He doesn’t mention REST, but this is exactly what can be achieved using REST. Of course, this isn’t a big surprise, as REST is a generalization of the principles Tim Berners-Lee implemented using HTTP and HTML.
A while ago i wrote: REST is a distributed data model. The point of the article was that by combining REST and REST aware query engines, the internet could be turned into one big database. I made this example to highlight the reason why REST is architecturally different from web services or message passing.
Tim Berners-Lee does have a very good point. Having raw data available on the internet in a way that it can be easily combined with other data on the internet would create useful and unexpected results. But having data available is one thing, being able to find it is just as important, and being able to query and mine it is also extremely important. But having all the data available is a very good start…