http://gcn.com/articles/2009/11/09/linked-government-data-feature.aspx
Excerpts:
"Now I want you to put your data on the Web," Berners-Lee said at a talk hosted by the Technology, Entertainment, Design organization earlier this year, where he introduced his concept of Linked Data. He identified the U.S. government as a candidate for early use of this format.

President Barack Obama "said American government data would be available on the Internet in an accessible format, and I hope they will put it up as Linked Data," Berners-Lee said.

For many, Linked Data is still a difficult concept to understand. After all, isn't data already on the Web, in terms of text on Web pages? Berners-Lee told the TED crowd, "You can read [documents] and follow links from them, and that's [about] it.… There is still huge unlocked potential."

Efforts such as the Office of Management and Budget's Data.gov have opened the doors to wider use of government data, though it is still not enough, Berners-Lee said at the conference. Posting the application programming interfaces and comma-separated values (CSV) files extracted from databases requires work by other programmers before the information becomes fully useful to citizens. The data should be encoded in HTML itself, he recommended. In doing so, the entire World Wide Web can host its own database.

The idea seems to be taking off, at least in pockets across the Web. A Web site that documents where Linked Data can be found online, called Linked Data, at last count found more than 4.2 billion assertions encoded in the Resource Description Framework across a variety of different data-annotating projects. The British Broadcasting Corporation has tested RDF to augment searches of its huge program guide. Best Buy and eBay have encoded their commercial listings in RDF. "

Video's - Semantic web
 http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?hl=en&q=%22World%20government%20global%20database%22&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#emb=0&hl=en&q=%22Semantic+web%22&view=3

Global database
 http://kencraggs.livejournal.com/

13 Resoureces for government linked data
 http://gcn.com/articles/2009/11/09/linked-government-data-sidebar-01-resources.aspx

Semantic web
 http://www.internetevolution.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=230359