Sunday, April 12, 2009

Birth of new Web: Giant-Global-Graph or GGG

We probably witness the birth of the new Web. At least someone named it. From the dawn of civilization we know that TO NAME is very often equivalent of TO KNOW.

Moses, facing the burning bush, asks G-d about His name, in a conviction that he must pass His name to his fellows, even though they had known Him already. And when the name is uttered, Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh — "I Will Be Who I Will Be" — there are no more questions that they have Infinite Power and Infinite Kindness behind them. The very notion of the name — the mystery hidden in it's letters — explained everything.

I try to avoid pompous air in my post — but I do have a feeling we have a birth of the new Web. And the name of it: GIANT-GLOBAL-GRAPH is much more appealing than "Semantic Web". In some sense I'm eager to drop my own-coined term "Web full of Meaning", though I like it very much and despite the fact it had a very cute, allegoric meaning in my mother's tongue: "Sieć pełna znaczeń".

But GGG concept is great because it can simply become this last click on the ratchet in the making of the new machinery of the web of data. Imagine, if we would adopt a habit of naming semantic information on our website as ggg.domain_name.suffix. For example, imagine that in addition to www.makolab.com, ggg.makolab.com would keep the entries to all semantically enabled data that could describe what are the resources at www.makolab.com and more. Anyone technical enough would immediately notice, that there is no mistery about domain names starting with "ggg", like there is nothing special about those starting with "www" — both humbly point to some resource. However, like www.makolab.com is for human visual perception, ggg.makolab.com would be for machines or softaware agents to discover what the site is all about.

Imagine that at ggg.sopekmir.blogspot.com you would find my FOAF definition, the RSS channels and all other semantic information related to my blog. And so on...

GGG was introduced in Tim-Berners-Lee blog post almost 1,5 years ago, but it didn't rise enough attention yet. There are few interesting blog posts here and there. See this as an example and very interesting another one. The fact that Wikipedia article is so short is also discouriging.
Maybe, because of the context - GGG was about Social Networks

But, as Tim wrote: "We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web." and for good - the Web is a web of documents, the Graph is a web of data, linked and full of meaning.

For both machines and us, mere mortals....

If you are new to the field, read good Wikipedia article about Semantic Web.

For Tim Berners Lee original vision expressed in simple words, read this article.

For the best introduction into Sematic Web, get "Semantic Web for Dummies" for your bed reading :-)


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