It’s a Digital revolution! PM Gordon Brown has just described Semantic Web and Linked Data as revolutionary.

The Prime Minister will talk about his vision for a new Digital Britain in a major speech this morning.

He will set out the action the Government is taking to ensure Britain is at the forefront of the next stage of the digital revolution ensuring superfast broadband reaches every home in the UK.

He will also set out how the Government can save billions of pounds a year and improve public services at the same time, by using new digital opportunities to create innovation and personisation in the delivery of public services.

Some dropped lines from my twitter stream..

- Britain’s Prime Minister is forcing government contracts to make all non-personal data public.
- UK gov to commision “Doomsday Book” detailing all non- personal datasets held by Depts.
- PM announcing mygov – app infrastructure for UK Government.
- Substantial package of OS data to be available from 1st April – without restrictions on reuse.
- PM announcing new data for data.gov.uk – 350k names and coords of national transport infrastructure.
- Institute to keep UK at cutting edge of research on Semantic Web and other emerging Web technologies.
- PM announcing £30m to create Insitute of Web Science. Best of world scientists, headed by Prof Nigel Shadbolt & Sir Tim Berners Lee.
- PM making a plan to secure recovery, growth, jobs, success in the global marketplace.
- PM committing to bring public borrowing down fairly and without damaging public services. (it seems just content free)
- PM is after open, interactive public services. Be prepared to cancel current projects (which?) to save £billions. Create 1/4 mill jobs( cancelling IT projects, or which ones?).
- PM announces commitment to greater transparency of workings of Whitehall. data.gov.uk, 1 Apr: Ordnance Survey data will be open.
- PM announcing that in autumn ALL non-personal government data will be released. “New Domesday book”, overseen by National Archives.
- PM says we will release all @directgov content for reuse.
- PM: we will close 500 more gov websites. New requirement that each will be interactive with citizens.
- PM: “My gov” will be gov on demand. Civil svnts will no longer be editors. Citizens will be in control, determining lvl of engagement“.
- PM: Opening more policy to e-petitions, scrutiny & consultation. Podcasts, twitter, flickr, youtube, new No10 iphone app (free)“

Gordon Brown gives a shout out to the semantic web and linked data.

-PM says that underpinning next generation of Britain is next generation of web: semantic web
- We need to make linked data usable in apps: do all to make data consumption and publishing easier than before! (John Sheridan wrote)
- The semantic web is going to help the government cut costs and bypass “digital bottlenecks”
I believe that semantic web will be just as disruptive to existing business models as the web was originally, Gordon Brown says.
Data made available should open up more involvement with small businesses.
Prof Shadbolt says that pushing down to localgov on opendata is essential, and I’m sure that  it can change the relationship between governments and citizens.

I think that  an open data set will require  a robust management framework and maybe  the internal human resources reallocation will follow it. Open data helps build a public service culture based on management,  one that is about enabling innovation.

What about the trust and accuracy of data? Do the citizen-collected data achieve the same dignity as to government-sanctioned data.  I mean there is an expectation that government does the right thing and provides trusted and accurate dataset, but I see  an asymmetry of the data flowing  from Government to citizens (to provide openness and transparency) and engagement flowing from citizen to government (to improve policy-making and services). Citizens are not only  on the receiving end of open data, they are application developers and data mashers, and the governments themselves will benefit from all this once they empower their employees to access and  to use data.

I think government processes will be based on crowdsourced  data.

Here is the full speech.