Graph

n.

a diagram representing a system of connections or interrelations among two or more things by a number of distinctive dots, lines, bars, etc.

From Tim Berners-Lee’s Blog:

The Net we normally use as short for Internet […] The realization was, “It isn’t the cables, it is the computers which are interesting”. […] Obvious, really.

The word Web we normally use as short for World Wide Web. […] The realization was “It isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting”. […] Obvious, really.

Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, “It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important”. Obvious, really.

We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.

[…] tools which allow us to break free of the document layer.

Bravo, Tim, still not losing the forest through the trees after all these years.

It’s all about the layers, he reminds us – first, we connected computers, then documents, and next, he thinks and I agree, ideas. Net, Web, Graph.

A perfect example of this movement, as he cites, is the plethora of social networking sites out there. (Facebook, Myspace, LiveJournal, etc) The actual subjects of the different sites, the friends, the people, transcend the individual systems, but each time you sign up for a new site, the “next big thing,” you have to tell it who all your friends are, just like you did for the others before it. There’s no way to represent the entity that is a person above the repetitive little database entries each site has about you.

The solution, of course, is not for the frustrated social networker to start the mother-of-all-networking-sites that will blot out all the others (pulling a Microsoft…), but to use this next generation of tools and formats that Tim/the W3C and others are making to transcend the barriers between the individual sites and tie together the ideas which they all represent, just as we transcended the barriers between computers and documents.

It’s the logical next step towards the waaayy future, connected society I envisioned, albeit a bit half-finished-ly, in the Meaning ML post.

Obvious, really.

(PPS actually read Tim’s post – there’s more goodies than I feel like writing about)

09:50 PM | 0 Comments

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