Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Semanticweb.com would be remiss not to comment on the blog that has been making waves in the semantic web community since its posting just before the Thanksgiving holiday. The reference here is to Tim Berners-Lee’s recent blog in which he whimsically coins the term “Giant Global Graph” as perhaps a more appropriate nomenclature than “semantic web.” (Not, he says, that it is his intent to try to change things at this point.)

Berners-Lee writes that the word graph — as in the social graph — has been featured more and more prominently in the thoughts and writings of semantic web experts, and ponders what the graph in its more general sense is all about, really.

It boils down to something like this: The Net links computers, the Web links documents, and the Graph expresses relationships among people or documents in a way that lends itself to reuse of that data.

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“That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is semantic web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer. If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know Dan Brickley, then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service. Un-manacled to specific documents,” Berners-Lee writes.

An interesting point that Berners-Lee raises in his blog is the flip side of the Giant Global Graph’s reliance on data sharing, which is some loss of control over that data. But he urges readers to fear not, as the Net, the Web, and now the Graph have always demanded that users cede some control in exchange for greater benefits.

He writes: “People running Internet systems had to let their computer be used for forwarding other people’s packets, and connecting new applications they had no control over. People making web sites sometimes tried to legally prevent others from linking into the site, as they wanted complete control of the user experience, and they would not link out as they did not want people to escape. Until after a few months they realized how the web works. And the re-use kicked in. And the payoff started blowing people’s minds.

Letting your data connect to other people’s data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don’t have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.”

But, given people’s sense of ownership over their data, how do they “let go and let Graph,” so to speak? In a paper published in June entitled “Information Accountability,” authored by MIT’s Daniel J. Weitzner, Gerald Jay Sussman, and Berners-Lee, (as well as Joan Feigenbaum of Yale University Department of Computer Science and James Hendler of Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute) propose ways to answer these concerns. The paper discusses developing systems “to extend the Web architecture to support data transparency and accountability. When information has been used, it should be possible to determine what happened, and to pinpoint use that is inappropriate.” How? By augmenting web information with data about provenance and usage policies, and creating automated means for maintaining that provenance and interpreting policies, the paper goes on to say.

Rather than focusing on information security and access restriction, this approach proposes technical mechanisms, called Policy Awareness, that operate within a public policy and systems architecture framework to provide clear views and machine-readable representations of policies associated with particular information resources, and that create accountability if those rules are not adhered to.

The document makes for some fascinating reading on how technology and social compacts can intersect to provide the information accountability that will help people let their data go on the semantic web. Read more at http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/37600/2/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2007-034.pdf.

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