This is the guy who invented the web, saying “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2025 4:13 am
If this technology exists, is mature enough to use, and is supported by one of the most influential people in the web community, why hasn’t it caught fire? What has kept it out of the mainstream?
Those of us old enough to remember the early days of the web will remember a time when converting documents to HTML and publishing them using the HTTP protocol was not the de-facto solution that it is today. The web, too, was an esoteric, academic technology with seemingly no use beyond the Ivory Tower.
Authoring HTML was vastly more difficult than writing plain text. There were no tools making it easy. Sharing documents over HTTP required technical know-how that very few people possessed. Sure, there were competing technologies like FTP, Gopher, and Usenet. If HTML was the great unifier, it wasn’t obvious at the time.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the web at CERN as a pragmatic solution to a real problem: information sharing between a tiny collective of scientists working across the globe. The first hundred thousand or so documents on the web were put there with considerable effort, and the benefit of participating in that “tiny” early web was close to nil compared to that of today’s web.
The catalyzing moment: when the true cost of sharing research information became too much to bear, innovation was the only path to a better solution.
Data from Measuring the Growth of the Web (June 1993 to June 1995)
As with any network effect, the value of the network increased exponentially as the size of the network increased, and the costs went down as the tools improved. The advent of web content authoring platforms (e.g., WordPress, Medium) and social media reduced the costs to, essentially, zero.
I could hand-write the HTML code for this article, and I could run my own HTTP server to respond to web requests for it — but why would I? This way, I only need to focus on the content. Anyone who can type words and click “Publish” can add information to the web.
The scope and influence of the web reached far beyond the imaginations of its innovators to become what it is today.
Growth of the web of Linked Open Data — images from https://lod-cloud.net/
Linked Data is at a similar inflection point.
Many of the same dynamics are at play:
The volume and diversity of data being created is leading to a crisis, a catalyzing event: the effort required to make data interoperable is consuming way too much of the energy canada whatsapp number data spent in data work. This is similar to the crisis of information sharing felt by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN that led to the adoption of the early web
Increasingly, organizations and individuals are looking for solutions to make sense of the data explosion, and Linked Data is perfectly designed to power those solutions
The web of Linked Data will continue to grow exponentially, not linearly — so each of these new steps will only accelerate the movement further
A new set of tools will emerge to make the publication of Linked Data something that can be accomplished without having to become an expert in the underlying mechanisms of the Semantic Web. This is the “flywheel” effect, where the network of Linked Data will simultaneously get more valuable and cheaper to leverage
Linking Open Data cloud diagram 2017, by Andrejs Abele, John P. McCrae, Paul Buitelaar, Anja Jentzsch and Richard Cyganiak — from https://lod-cloud.net/
The web of Linked Data is the natural evolution of the web, growing exponentially and adapting to the new models of information processing that have arisen as we’ve become more connected. The web has put previously unimaginable information resources in the palm of our hand and generates staggering amounts of data, pushing us to develop new ways to use this abundance to understand our world. Modern data science practices, especially artificial intelligence and machine learning, also drive us to reshape the way we share information on the web.
Those of us old enough to remember the early days of the web will remember a time when converting documents to HTML and publishing them using the HTTP protocol was not the de-facto solution that it is today. The web, too, was an esoteric, academic technology with seemingly no use beyond the Ivory Tower.
Authoring HTML was vastly more difficult than writing plain text. There were no tools making it easy. Sharing documents over HTTP required technical know-how that very few people possessed. Sure, there were competing technologies like FTP, Gopher, and Usenet. If HTML was the great unifier, it wasn’t obvious at the time.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the web at CERN as a pragmatic solution to a real problem: information sharing between a tiny collective of scientists working across the globe. The first hundred thousand or so documents on the web were put there with considerable effort, and the benefit of participating in that “tiny” early web was close to nil compared to that of today’s web.
The catalyzing moment: when the true cost of sharing research information became too much to bear, innovation was the only path to a better solution.
Data from Measuring the Growth of the Web (June 1993 to June 1995)
As with any network effect, the value of the network increased exponentially as the size of the network increased, and the costs went down as the tools improved. The advent of web content authoring platforms (e.g., WordPress, Medium) and social media reduced the costs to, essentially, zero.
I could hand-write the HTML code for this article, and I could run my own HTTP server to respond to web requests for it — but why would I? This way, I only need to focus on the content. Anyone who can type words and click “Publish” can add information to the web.
The scope and influence of the web reached far beyond the imaginations of its innovators to become what it is today.
Growth of the web of Linked Open Data — images from https://lod-cloud.net/
Linked Data is at a similar inflection point.
Many of the same dynamics are at play:
The volume and diversity of data being created is leading to a crisis, a catalyzing event: the effort required to make data interoperable is consuming way too much of the energy canada whatsapp number data spent in data work. This is similar to the crisis of information sharing felt by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN that led to the adoption of the early web
Increasingly, organizations and individuals are looking for solutions to make sense of the data explosion, and Linked Data is perfectly designed to power those solutions
The web of Linked Data will continue to grow exponentially, not linearly — so each of these new steps will only accelerate the movement further
A new set of tools will emerge to make the publication of Linked Data something that can be accomplished without having to become an expert in the underlying mechanisms of the Semantic Web. This is the “flywheel” effect, where the network of Linked Data will simultaneously get more valuable and cheaper to leverage
Linking Open Data cloud diagram 2017, by Andrejs Abele, John P. McCrae, Paul Buitelaar, Anja Jentzsch and Richard Cyganiak — from https://lod-cloud.net/
The web of Linked Data is the natural evolution of the web, growing exponentially and adapting to the new models of information processing that have arisen as we’ve become more connected. The web has put previously unimaginable information resources in the palm of our hand and generates staggering amounts of data, pushing us to develop new ways to use this abundance to understand our world. Modern data science practices, especially artificial intelligence and machine learning, also drive us to reshape the way we share information on the web.