Ruben Verborgh’s recent blog post on technology for knowledge management is best captured in this paragraph.

The Web API ecosystem as we know it today has been designed for a very different Web than the Web we want for the future, as our analysis has revealed. Data will still be remote, but also decentralized: spread across multiple servers and different APIs.

The premise of a robust global semantic Web is that an application can use whatever ontology it wants, while pulling data in different formats. If that sounds both exciting and scary to you, let’s talk.

Such interoperability is a tip of the iceberg for the deeply complicated reality of big data security — an unavoidable core future challenge to the industry purporting to protect data from threats (unauthorized access). Who will be granted so much authority that they can assemble knowledge from data no matter the source or format?