From Net to Web to Graph

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, blogs a clearer vision of Web 3.0, aka the Semantic Web: the Giant Global Graph.

Here’s the short version: pre-Net communication was about the wires. The Net is about the computers connected by those wires. The Web is about the documents on those computers. The Graph will be about the objects described by those documents.

Biologists are interested in proteins, drugs, genes. Businesspeople are interested in customers, products, sales. We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is a lot of blogging about the strain, and total frustration that, while you have a set of friends, the Web is providing you with separate documents about your friends. One in facebook, one on linkedin, one in livejournal, one on advogato, and so on. The frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again. The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing — but the system doesn’t know it.

Sir Berners-Lee sees the seeds of the Graph in portable social network standards like FOAF. What he proposes is a world where information is completely independent of the documents containing that information — which is really not that hard to imagine.

So what do you think? Can you see the entire world in the document-independent framework of a Giant Global Graph — a GGG, if you will?