It is here, in the use and reuse of data, that the potential of the cloud will be realized. Back to the previously cited conversation between Nick Carr and Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly himself comes very close to saying so:

"In short, Google is the ultimate network effects machine. 'Harnessing collective intelligence' isn't a different idea from network effects, as Nick argues. It is in fact the science of network effects -- understanding and applying the implications of networks.

"I want to emphasize one more point: the heart of my argument about Web 2.0 is that the network effects that matter today are network effects in data. My thought process (outlined in 'The Open Source Paradigm Shift' and then in 'What is Web 2.0?,' went something like this:

1. The consequence of IBM's design of a personal computer made out of commodity, off-the-shelf parts was to drive attractive margins out of hardware and into software, via Clayton Christensen's 'law of conservation of attractive profits.' Hardware became a low margin business; software became a very high margin business.
2. Open-source software and the standardized protocols of the Internet are doing the same thing to software. Margins will go down in software, but per the law of conservation of attractive profits, this means that they will go up somewhere else. Where?
3. The next layer of attractive profits will accrue to companies that build data-backed applications in which the data gets better the more people use the system. This is what I've called Web 2.0.

It's network effects (perhaps more simply described as virtuous circles) in data that ultimately matter, not network effects per se."
(my emphasis)

Talis CTO Ian Davis would appear to agree, commenting:

"People need to be investing in their data as the long-term carrier of value, not the applications around them... The data is more likely to persist than the software, so it's important to get the data right and take care of it."

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, too, used his Dreamforce User Conference this month to move a company long associated with the "data-centre extending cloud" firmly in the direction of embracing data and the network. As Krishnan Subramanian noted on Cloud Ave before the keynote:

"Till now, the Force.com platform served business users to develop apps that can be used internally within an organization. They have to tap into Force.com APIs from outside platforms to offer customer-facing web apps. With the new initiative, it becomes easy for customers to allow the Internet users to 'interact' with their data."

Over on VentureBeat, Anthony Ha had more:

"Salesforce.com wants to become an even big player in the cloud computing market with a new service called Force.com Sites, which allows companies to host public-facing web applications in the Force.com platform. That means Salesforce --- nominally a maker of customer relationship management (CRM) software, but also an increasingly important platform for business-related applications --- is moving closer to direct competition with cloud giants like Amazon Web Services and the Google App Engine."

Locked away within an organization and only accessed by that organization's applications, data cannot be put to full use. Much of the value in each individual datum lies in comparing it to other measurements, in delving into detail, and in pulling back to observe the bigger picture.

Organizations that believe that either the big picture or the detail resides in their own systems alone are woefully misguided. Even the most specialized, proprietary, and confidential of data only reveal their true value when put in context, and that context is all the richer when informed by numerous perspectives.

Cloud computing, and the various SaaS movements, have finally brought us to a place where the fiercely guarded and tightly delineated boundaries between the organization and those outside it may become permeable in ways that should benefit the organization rather than threaten it. Data is just a resource. In the terminology of Geoffrey Moore, most data are often mere context, and there are savings to be made both in reusing the data of others and in re-selling necessary context to those prepared to pay. Some data, of course, is core to the business, and this may continue to receive the same reverence and protection that we misguidedly apply to the entire database today. Even here, though, the opportunities afforded by (controlled?) sharing may outweigh any desire to maintain data protectionism.

The language of Groundswell offers opportunities to go further, to embrace and exploit the behaviors and motivations of customers and the wider web.

There is clearly far more to say in clarifying this view of both the components and the whole, but at over 2,000 words, this post has perhaps gone on long enough.

For now, then, we should conclude by asking what role the semantic web has to play in any of this. The semantic web, with its unadulterated recognition of the primacy of the web's hyperlink? The semantic web, designed from the outset to convey context and relationships derived from data spread across the web? The semantic web, supported by technologies that operate openly and on the scale of the web?

Isn't it obvious yet?

Returning to the Web 2.0 Summit with which we began, another presentation was from Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired Magazine. Steve Gillmor and Nicole Ferraro reported on his presentation at the time, and the video was subsequently shared online, echoing Kelly's earlier presentation (which I greatly enjoyed), in which he argued:

"You have to be open to having your data shared... which is a much bigger step than just sharing your web pages or your computer."

Yep, here we go, on a journey toward Kevin Kelly's "World Wide Database," which will take in a lot of the shifts facing enterprise computing along the way.

This is a guest post by Paul Miller, a Semantic Web and Cloud Computing expert who was most recently a Technology Evangelist at UK technology company, Talis.