Tim Berners-Lee has a critically important posting which gives a key understanding to the totality of post-WWW technological evolution.
Tim Berners-Lee proposes a three-phased evolution of the internet/web:
1. The internet (III = International Information Infrastructure) as the interconnecting of computers
2. The web (WWW) as the interconnecting of documents
3. The GGG (literally: Global Giant Graph) as the interconnecting of the semantic objects (i.e. what the pages are about), irrespective of their document location
You’ll have to read the totality of the entry, but here is part of the conclusion:
” In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That’s what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.”
For more background: see our entries on:
1) The Semantic Web
2) The Social Graph