Earlier this month, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown tapped Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help Britain make its governmental data more transparent.  As a Knight Commander, the father-of-the-Internet, and a vocal advocate for the Semantic Web and open-data, Sir Berners-Lee was a logical choice for the project.

In the time since, Berners-Lee has clearly been busy.  Two days ago (June 22nd, 2009) on W3C, he published Putting Government Data online, a combination manifesto and how-to guide for getting institutional data online.

The article is part how-to, outlinjng concrete steps to turn in-house institutional data into useable linked data, and part rallying-cry, encouraging people at all levels to simply get on with it.  Whether your data are currently in the form of spreadsheets, XML, relational databases or other formats, Berners-Lee's article has both advise and encouragement for you.

Having seen his talk at TED on linked data, it seems fair to say that Berners-Lee has come away from his experiences building the Web with a healthy respect for how standards that facilitate broad popular effort can change the world.  For now he'd like us to get started and work out the details as we go.