Social Semantic Information Spaces

The structural and syntactic web put in place in the early 90s is still much the same as what we use today: resources (web pages, files, etc.) connected by untyped hyperlinks. By untyped, we mean that there is no easy way for a computer to figure out what a link between two pages means { for example, on the W3C website, there are hundreds of links to the various organisations that are registered members of the association, but there is nothing explicitly saying that the link is to an organisation that is a \member of” the W3C or what type of organisation is represented by the link. On John's work page, he links to many papers he has written, but it does not explicitly say that he is the author of those papers or that he wrote such-and-such when he was working at a particular university.

In fact, the Web was envisaged to be much more, as one can see from the image in Fig. 1 which is taken from Tim Berners{Lee's original outline for the Web in 1989, entitled \Information Management: A Proposal”. In this, all the resources are connected by links describing the type of relationships, e.g. \wrote”, \describe”, \refers to”, etc. This is a precursor to the Semantic Web which we will come back to later.