Toby Segaran is the Chief Data Wrangler for Metaweb, a company that’s been working on the Semantic Web. He’s going to be speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC on Thursday in a talk entitled The Ecosystem of Corporate and Social Data. I asked Toby to tell us a bit about his talk:

You work at Metaweb (Freebase) and wrote the O’Reilly book “Programming Collective Intelligence“. How will these influence your talk on data?

Toby: I wrote “Programming Collective Intelligence” because I believe that being able to analyze data, particularly user-generated data, will be an important skill for building interesting applications in the future and I was excited to work on Freebase, because it gives me the chance to open up new data sources for everyone. I hope that my talk inspires and guides people to creating new data-driven applications that I haven’t envisioned.

The title of your talk is “The ecosystem of corporate and social data”. Most of your projects use data from the open web. What are the data sources you’ll be talking about? Will they work for the enterprise?

Toby: I’ll be looking at government data sources, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Census Bureau. I’ll also be looking at what companies themselves say in their press releases and what news sources and bloggers talk about. The demos I’ve done so far have attracted the attention of bigger companies as well as data geeks.

What do you think the top take-away will be?

Toby: There’s a lot of cool data out there for people to use, and we’re just starting to see what’s possible. It’s going to be painful to clean it all up and make it useful, but it’s worth it — the next step in building cool applications is powering them with more relevant information.

What are you working on now?

Toby: I just started writing a new book on semantic data, with Jamie Taylor and Colin Evans. We’re hoping to take a much-hyped topic and turn it into real code that people can use. Besides that, freeing data and making it useful!

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