Tim Berners-Lee: From the World Wide Web to the Giant Global Graph

According to one of the founding fathers of the World Network, Tim Berners-Lee, his brainchild is now undergoing an evolutionary transition. If to be expressed terminologically, then there is a transformation from WWW to GGG, that is, from the “World Wide Web” to the “Giant Global Graph”. Tim explains this thesis in his personal blog (where he writes under the pseudonym timbl).

So Tim Berners-Lee speaks of nothing but a global social graph . Before him, this concept was already discussed by Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold . The idea is to use modern technology to create a global "map" of all people on the planet and their connections with each other. In practical terms, this means combining all existing social networks using a single technology. The giant global graph is a meta-engine for all existing and future social networks.

“Now people often talk about their emotional fatigue and total disappointment because, if you have a circle of friends, the Network offers you instead just a set of documents about your friends. One on Facebook, one on Linkedin, one on Livejournal, one on Advogato, and so on, writes Tim Berners-Lee. - The disappointment is that when registering on a new photosite, video site or travel site and others, you need to tell who your friends are, again and again. Separate websites, separate documents actually repeat each other, but the system does not understand this. ”

According to Berners-Lee, the transition to the GGG level fits perfectly into the evolution of the World Wide Web as a logical abstraction of the next level. At the first level of evolution, we abstract from wires in favor of computers (this is how the Network originated), then abstract from computers in favor of websites, that is, separate documents (WWW), but now you can go further.
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The term “social graph” may be better suited to describe the evolutionary development of the web than the term “semantic network” that Tim Berners-Lee spoke about earlier. But, in fact, according to him, we are talking about the same technology (starting with RDF OWL, SPARQL and the FOAF format). A technology that “hacks” the level of documents and frees information.