The web has been a transformational technology and an incredibly powerful tool, today largely made up of linked documents. But as it continues to evolve and to achieve its full promise as a global information space, we need to link the data embedded in documents, databases, spreadsheets and wherever else it might be lurking. Linking data using new web standards will create an information fabric that will be even more powerful than that which we experience at the moment.

The web of linked data has the same open structure as the worldwide web, so that anyone can publish any information they like, using ideas that have been developed by the Semantic Web community. It is up and running now ­following a few basic principles, anyone can publish their data in this way.

As a result, we can browse data that has been extracted from Wikipedia. The result, DBpedia, contains all the facts about places, people and events contained in the online encyclopedia text articles. This can be linked to other resources ­ for example, geographic data about eight million place names contained in Geonames, or the hundreds of thousands of musical artists and eight million tracks contained in MusicBrainz, to name but two.

The Linked Open Data project, which aims to publish data sets to establish an openly shareable data commons on the web, claims 4.7 billion facts with hundreds of millions of links between them. Tools and browsers are springing up to exploit this torrent of information.

The University of Southampton has undertaken a successful pilot with the Office of Public Sector Information to use linked data technology to make government information reusable. More recently, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt have been appointed as advisers to the UK government on ways to make public information as widely available and reusable as possible. The output will not be merely a specification, but rather an implementation, pioneering the publication of linked data using the new web standards.

This brave new world of linked data creates many questions. What architectures will be needed? Which browsers? Exactly how should we fuse data from different sources? How can we trust data gathered from across the web? What are the issues concerning privacy and security? And what institutional changes in organisations will be needed to support the routine publication of non-sensitive data?

There will be many applications for businesses. Understanding what these might be and how existing businesses will be affected is as important to get to grips with as it was during the first wave of the web in the 1990s. There will be many opportunities for entrepreneurs to prove their worth by developing the applications and services that a web of linked data will require.

But the web of linked data is as much social as it is technical, and to understand it will require input from a wide range of disciplines ­ computer science, economics, psychology, law, management and others ­ as part of a new interdisciplinary endeavour we call web science. We believe this is essential if we are to understand the web as it evolves.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt from the University of Southampton are co-founders, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, of the Web Science Research Initiative. They will speak at the Online Information Conference 2009 on 1-3 December at Olympia in London. See www.online-information.co.uk/conference