Everyone was waiting to hear Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the second day of Lotusphere 2012 at Orlando, Florida. We wondered about the expected announcement on Web standards. And IBM got Sir Berners-Lee to break the news at a keynote at Lotusphere 2012.  He spoke of link data and how it was becoming increasingly important in socially connected communities. Very recently, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is led by Berners-Lee, made some recommendations in a report on how standards around social networking could lead to innovation in business.

“We are moving from a Web of documents, which people do not understand, to things like calendars and address cards, which are understandable. When you pack all this together you can get to a person and to their friends, and go through the music they like and find other important things like which town they were born in. You can do all these things using all the data you had access to,” said Berners-Lee.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web

This concept will allow you to link across and compare data from different applications, added Berners-Lee. So an address book and another application might be able to share some of the fields. Because the data is stored separately from the applications, it will become easier to move data sets from one application to another.

The inventor of the Web also made references to the W3C’s Social Business Community Group. W3C is an international community where member organizations and the public work together to develop Web standards.

In a recently published report, the W3C outlines how the Social Business Community Group will evolve social networking standards around customer-driven use cases. This report is the outcome of the Social Business Jam, an online event that occurred last November. The event, which used IBM's Collaboration Jam platform, explored how standards around social networking, such as those developed by the Federated Social Web XG, could lead to increased innovation throughout the business cycle.

Later in the day, Angel Diaz, VP, Software Standards and the Cloud, IBM offered more details.

“For the Social Standards Business Jam we got thousands of people from across the world to talk about the use cases where the standards need to work together. The output led to the formation of the W3C’s Social Business Community that was launched this week. It will define use cases for evolving standards; the W3C will take those standards to the different standards bodies to make sure that they work well together. IBM will contribute its use cases,” said Diaz.

Standards like OAuth, OpenSocial, Activity Stream, Open ID and HTML 5 will make it easier for businesses to adopt social applications.

“The thing that I am excited about is the way social business is arising and how people are collaborating through this new power of linked data,” said Berners-Lee.

The writer was hosted by IBM in Florida, USA