In the near future, the semantic web data will be precisely tagged and thus a whole lot easier to find. This will further spur the trend of the web and global society becoming tight networks that are increasingly interdependent and transparent. Do we have to sacrifice anonymity on the web in order to retain trust for collaboration? Or could we see a web emerge that functions as a kind of operating system with different users and permissions to run this global machine which we call the internet?

The semantic web

This talk of Kevin Kelly on the future of the web has got me thinking. Kelly says that the first step of the Internet was about linking computers to each other: you could FTP into another computer and access its files. The second step was the World Wide Web: connecting HTML-pages, each page had a URL and users jumped from page to page by clicking on embedded links. He goes on to say that the next step will be the semantic web, where actual data is interlinked.

The concept is not to have the data just displayed on the page (<item>cat</item>), but to link it to a definition or similar (<item rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Cat">cat</item>). This will make the data itself directly accessible from elsewhere. You won’t be limited to just looking at a page, but it will be possible to find and grab specific data from all around the web (without having to bother on what HTML page it resides) and have it automatically assembled and put to various uses. You could feed the data into a program (or web-application) to further process it, or you could search, sort and display the data in various customizable formats, views etc. Instead of making a flat search for anything containing the word “cat”, you can search for every object tagged with rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Cat which is a lot more precise. If the same object is also tagged with GPS-coordinates, you can easily find all the Cats on the web and automatically map them onto a world map, for example.

Figure 1: the semantic web is about connecting words and concepts, not only HTML-pages anymore (Credit: a slide of Kevin Kelly’s presentation at TED: www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html CC-by-nc-nd 3.0)

Networks

He probably wasn’t the first, but Kelly suggests looking at the Internet as just one giant planetary machine and the web as its operating system. With the rise of AJAX web applications, Google Chrome and YouTube, this operating system is becoming more capable every day. This machine is radically decentralized and therefore quite reliable, having virtually no downtime. As Linus Torvalds put it “Why do backups? I just put my stuff on the net and people mirror it!”. This huge machine is the medium for unprecedented collaboration and communication and the web of information gets woven tighter and more important every day. A computer without internet is not much more than a type-writer these days. As the web becomes more semantic, each part on the network becomes part of the whole machine. Single actions, such as writing a small paragraph of a Wikipedia article, become meaningless unless they are integrated into the whole.

The Internet is much more valuable than the sum of its parts, which are increasingly dependent on one another

On the Internet, abstraction layers like HTML or the semantic framework reduce the time and thus the cost for finding and accessing information. Generally, it seems that as cost for connecting the nodes falls, it becomes more efficient for the parts of the system to specialize and integrate tighter. The result is that the whole is much more valuable than the sum of its parts. And the parts of the system become interdependent (all the parts depend on one another).

Figure 2: The internet is a global network or one planetary machine (Credit: a slide of Kevin Kelly’s presentation at TED: www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html CC-by-nc-nd 3.0)

In every interdependent system having the connection break down is a real threat to continuity mostly because of the gains in connecting. So it’s a risk you just have to take and you have to work as hard as possible to ensure that the connections don’t break.