III to WWW to GGG

Tim Berners-Lee has posted his thoughts on the development of the internet building on his idea of the Social Web.  He sees the development of the internet in three, distinct stages.  He calls the first the international information infrastructure -III- parodying Al Gore’s NII phrase which he coined in the early 90s. This essentially made it easy to network computers.  This moved into the WWW where documents could be linked and exchanged which went beyond networking of computers and increased the power and impact of users. The actual computer connections were hidden and you could focus on the exchange of information. The third phase is the GGG:  Giant, Global Graph.  We move into a focus on the things the documents are about and the people behind them.  Allowing relationships and links to transcend individual applications and sites. It is thinking about connections on myriad devices,  so that data is allowed to seamless connect. The individual loses some control but gets ehnanced benefits. The wikipedia article on the Semantic Web gives more detailed background.  This is such an obvious direction to take it is almost as if the applications layer of the WWW disappears and we can focus on the connections.