You might have noticed it already at Friday the launch of Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com).
The semantic search engine from Wolfram Mathematica that gives you answers based on many many linked databases.
(this one is simple in queries and interface, runs smooth, and looks sexy)

For example “how many times fits the goldengate bridge between the moon and the earth?”:
http://www59.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+moon+earth+%2F+length+golden+gate+bridge

Not only the interpretation ans presentation of the data is magnificent, especially when you ask about chemical structures or music notes
http://www59.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=D%20dominant%20eleventh , but how the data is connected?

With this we see that Open Data becomes very important to find new answers and find new hypotheses for research.
See: ted.com/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web

and ted.com/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen

Both explain an infrastructure is needed in order for data to be used, by for example Worlfram Alpha, in an open and efficient way.

To create Open Data it is important to have an infrastructrure like DRIVER (www.driver-community.eu), where we tell the machine how to interpret a (meta?)data field. Agreements around protocols, semantics and ontologies become more and more important.
I hope this will be considered in the next driver-like project.

The Semantic search engine – Wolfram Alpha – opportunity for Open Data infrastructures? by maurice vanderfeesten, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands License.