Opinion
It seems to me that what was once referred to as the Internet is becoming an interlinked structure connected by means of concepts.
I have been thinking about this since Tim Berners Lee published his blog post on 21 November, coining a new phrase for the Web: “Giant Global Graph” (Given that he is the inventor of the World Wide Web, posting this phrase on his blog will undoubtedly lead to him being credited as the creator of the “GGG” phrase as well). I cannot say that I disagree with Berners-Lee’s conceptualisation of the Internet as a GGG. In his blog post, he states that the Internet connected computers, the Web connected documents, and that the Graph connects content.
At its most basic, the Graph is constructed of connected concepts which can be viewed as possibly infinite. File formats, structures, and representation languages used no longer place boundaries on the transfer of information, as they once did before the advent of the Semantic Web. Concepts transcend the restrictions of formats and represent relationships.
However, one question comes to my mind. What is the meaning of the word “Graph”? The The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1996) defines it as:
graph XIX. orig. (chem.) short for GRAPHIC formula, in which lines are used to indicate the connections of elements; hence in math.
To me, this is relatively acceptable definition for the English word “graph”. But, the word graph is just a term for a connected structure. What about the millions of people who do not speak English? Will they also adopt the English term “Giant Global Graph”? Or, what I consider more likely, will they simply have a conceptual image of what is in English termed the “Graph” as a connected structure of concepts? And thus label this structure with the most appropriate (or already existing) term from their own language? In this case, I am referring to those people in the Semantic Web community and other interrelated communities who are aware of the emergence of the “Giant Global Graph”. The point I am making is that the “Graph” is not so much a specific term, but a conceptual structure which has been created (and is being improved) by Semantic Web technologies. It represents an almost infinite number of concepts from nature and humankind, and the relationships between the concepts. This is also what an ontology intends to capture. Which brings the description of an ontology closer to the original philosophical definition of an ontology: the science of being.
Tags: giant global graph, graph, ontology, Semantic Web, tim berners-lee