Tim Berners-Lee conceptualised the web when he was at CERN. He built a directory of the people, groups and projects - this was the ENQUIRE project. This eventually morphed into the World Wide Web, or a “Web of Documents”. Documents are indeed “objects”, but often not structurally defined. A great book about this is “Weaving the Web” by Berners-Lee.

The boom in this way of thinking came when businesses started to use XML to define “objects” within their processes. Being able to define something and pass it between one system and another was incredibly useful. For instance, I was in a development team quite a while back where we were communicating with BT using XML to describe land-line telephone accounts.

At the same time, people starting developing and using a new flavour of the “web” which was a lot more sociable. We saw the rise of “profiles“, “instant messaging“, “blogging” and “microblogging/broadcasting”. All of which are very easily to understand in terms of “objects”: Person X is described as (alpha, beta, omega) and owns a Blog B which is made up of Posts [p] and a Twitter account T which is made up of Updates [u].

The first reaction to the use of objects for web communications, was to provide developers with object descriptions using XML via “Application Programming Interfaces” (API) using the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This was the birth of “Web Services“. Using web services a business could “talk” over the web, and social networks could “grab” data.

Unfortunately this wasn’t enough, as XML does not provide a standardised way of describing things, and also does not provide a standardised way of describing things in a distributed fashion. Distributed description is incredibly useful, it allows things to stay up to date - and not only that - it is philosophically/ethically more sound as people/groups/businesses “keep” their own data objects. The Semantic Web provided the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to deal with this, and the Linked Data initiative extends this effort to its true potential by providing analogues in well-used situations, processes and tools. (For instance, see my previous blog post on how Linked Data is both format and model agnostic).

This is all good. However, we live in an age where Collaboration is essential. With Collaboration comes the ability to edit, and with the ability to edit comes the need to have systems in place that can handle the areas of “identification“, “authentication“, “authorisation” and “trust“. We are starting to see this in systems such as OpenID, OAuth and WebID - particularly when coupled with FOAF [1].

These systems will be essential for getting distributed collaboration (via Linked Data) right, and distributed collaboration should be dealt with by the major Semantic Web / Linked Data software providers - and should be what web developers are thinking about next. Distributed Collaboration is going to be incredibly useful for both business-based and social-based web applications.

Please do feel free to comment if you have any relevant comments, or if you have any links to share relevant to the topic.

Many thanks,

Daniel

Footnotes

1. There is some nice information about WebID at the W3C site. Also see FOAF+SSL on the Openlink website, and the WebID protocol page on the OpenLink website.