Alas, the corporate data silo that we’ve all learned to love and cherish is slipping away. However, the enterprise, cross-enterprise, and cloud-based metadata and semantic data world taking its place means more than just lots of more data available to everyone. It means profound changes to the way we look at work, relationships, and the enterprise itself.

Paul Miller provides a summary of Kingsley Idehen’s comments at the recent Linked Data Planet conference in New York. Kingsley explored some themes we have been bouncing around at this blogsite as well — that is, how enterprises view the relationship between Web 2.0 and employee productivity.

The emerging semantic Web — in which intelligence is applied to data in the cloud — is blurring all the lines that demarcated employees versus customers, work time versus personal time, and even enterprises versus individuals.  At the core is the idea of “Linked Data,”a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee that describes HTTP-based Data Access by Reference on the Web.

Kingsley is also highly linked himself. Access to slides from his presentation can be found here at his blogsite or here at AuthorStream, among many other places.

As Paul relates in his summary, Kingsley said that the revolution in “user generated content” in the consumer space has spread to enterprise environments. While this is a good thing, it also creates “increasingly complex challenges in engaging with and empowering its employees on the one hand, and recognizing and responding to the blurring lines between work time and personal time, employee and customer on the other.”

Linked Data, Kingsley argued, offers a powerful means to “mesh disparate and heterogenous data” over the web in ways that cross some of these boundaries.