On March 13th, 2009 the World Wide Web will turn 20 years old. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented this world-changing layer on top of the Internet on this day in 1989. It’s hard to overstate the impact this young technology has had already and it’s even more exciting to think about where it’s going in the future.

Berners-Lee has some great ideas about where the web should go next. His vision is of a major advance that could serve as the foundation for innovations that we can’t even imagine today.

One year ago Berners-Lee said that all the pieces needed to build a new Semantic Web are now in place. Last month he gave an impassioned talk at the high-profile TED conference about a related concept called Linked Data, a set of ideas he outlined in 2006. The gist of the idea is that we need every institution that can do so putting raw data in standardized format up on the web.

What’s so exciting about raw data? We’ll defer to Berners-Lee’s 15 minute explanation at this year’s TED conference. The video of his talk will be posted on the TED website early Friday morning, but ReadWriteWeb readers can check it out now.

Thank you Tim, for what you’ve done for the world already.