This is a guest post by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and founder of the World Wide Web Foundation.
Originally, the acute frustration which led me to invent the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989 was all about documents. The frustration was that all kinds of documents were sitting in disks on machines. Even at a very advanced place like the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), a networked world in which most computers in my environment were connected, one couldn't easily browse through all the files. The WWW design offered a solution, and the world of linked documents exploded dramatically.
However, even at the first web conference in 1994, it was clear that a rather complex and potentially more profound frustration (and opportunity) existed when you looked at data rather than documents. Data, after all, is stuff machines can handle, and while the web of documents might have seemed intoxicating to early web "surfers", the lure of doing the same thing to the data was that we could create a world in which it would be programs -- not just people -- that would enjoy the data.