An example would be DBPedia, a service that extracts data fro m Wikipedia and makes it machine readable via SPARQL (language similar to SQL).

For instance, here is what Wikipedia has to say about Triplestore:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore

And here is DBPedia representation of it:

http://dbpedia.org/page/Triplestore

And here's how you'd get the data from DBPedia programmatically using SPARQL -

select * where { <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Triplestore> ?p ?o. }

Try it here - http://dbpedia.org/sparql/

Mediocracy or mediocrity?

I think he refers to the tyranny of popularity-based development.

Agree, nice post.

Two of the major challenges displacing PPT with interactive tools, particularly in consulting, market research type of business, where large 100+ slide decks are common, are going to be the (1) need to produce decks on clients' templates and (2) need to email decks.

The direction in which a few emerging CSS/JS based tools (slides, reveal, etc) are going will not solve that problem. D3/WebGL etc. are awesome, of course, for the web. However it's relatively rare when a busy exec will have time to use non PPT based deck.

I agree with your sentiment about email, and wanted to add that the major reason for this is still a fear of lack of Internet. There has never been a meeting I've attended in ~20 years where we didn't have a backup plan if we had no Internet. This still looks like a solutions that needs the Internet to work. MS would do well to make these formats offline and open-able with the next version of PPT. Take that to the bank!

>There has never been a meeting I've attended in ~20 years where we didn't have a backup plan if we had no Internet.

In what kind of business? This sounds like totally atypical in any modern enterprise.

And where did they put the camera?

I did notice a lot of misspellings on the graph legends :)