I’m proud to announce that Ken North and I are co-chairing the LinkedData Planet Conference and Expo being held in New York City on June 17th and 18th. “Linked Data” refers to the increasing amount of machine-accessible useful data on the public web and the growing collection of practices that let us use different sets of public and private data together to get more out of those sets of data. By combining tools and techniques from the semantic web world, the enterprise database management world, and the XML world, developers are doing fascinating new things every day.

Listing Bart Simpson blackboard gags is a silly example, but it shows how a standard query language can access a large, public database to find out some very interesting things, and DBpedia has a lot of data that will be valuable to more useful applications. And, since I wrote that three months ago, that query language became a standard—things are moving very quickly in the world of Linked Data.

I first met Ken when the Internet bubble economy supported several XML conferences per year, and since then I’ve grown to value his big-picture historical perspective on the evolution of database technology. (For example, check out his Excellence in Database Technology page.) He’s not looking at this technology from inside of the XML/publishing/semantic web geek world like I tend to, and he makes an excellent advocate for Linked Data technology in the enterprise database management world. The conference has also benefited a great deal from the inspiration of OpenLink Software’s Kingsley Idehen, who I first knew as the blogger interested in semantic web issues who left the most interesting comments on my own weblog. His experience with OpenLink’s technology and clients have given him a vision for the future of Linked Data that is quite inspiring when you hear him discuss it.

We’ve got one speaker lined up already: Tim Berners-Lee, who’s been thinking about the possibilities of linked data for a while. If you’re interested in Linked Data, please submit something on the call for speakers page to tell us what you’ve done or what you’re working on. We’d love to hear about it.