Three decades later...what's next? A brief history of innovators who helped birth the Web, what they dreamed of, what they designed, and how we might pick up the mantel and continue the march forward for greater human flourishment.

1. Whither the Web?
Three decades later…what’s next?

2. Hi
• aka BigBlueHat
• Solutions Architect at John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Co-Editor of the W3C Web Annotation Data Model & Vocabulary
• Co-Chair of the W3C JSON-LD Working Group
• Co-Editor of the ARIA Annotations spec (draft!)
• Contributor to the W3C Web Publishing Working Group
• Core Committer at Apache Annotator

3. Information
Management
a very brief history…of why I care

5. Vannevar
Bush

6. Memex – circa 1945
• “We seem to be worse off than before — for we can
enormously extend the record; yet even in its
present bulk we can hardly consult it.”
• “One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and
flexibility with which the mind follows an
associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the
mind decisively in regard to the permanence and
clarity of the items resurrected from storage.”
• Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear,
ready made with a mesh of associative trails
running through them, ready to be dropped into the
memex and there amplified.

7. The
Mechanical
Encyclopedia
Invented by Angela
Ruiz Robles in 1949
A “read only” memex

8. Dr. Douglas C.
Engelbart

9. Mother of All Demos
& Acronyms
• Mother of All Demos – the
mouse, keyboard(s), video
conferencing, hypertext
• DKR – Dynamic Knowledge
Repository
• OHS – Open Hyperdocument
System
• CoDIAK – the Concurrent
Development, Integration, and
Application of Knowledge
• NLS – oNLine System

10. Frode Hegland
(and friends)
• Future of Text
• Demo@50
• HyperKnowledge
 Web Annotation, JSON-LD
• Jrnl
 Journal from NLS/Augment

11. Ted Nelson

12. Words
• Hypertext and Hypermedia in 1963
• Transclusion
• Virtuality
• Intertwingularity (in Literary Machines)
• Docuverse

13. Inventions
(some of them)
Project Xandadu ZigZag

14. Sir Tim
Berners-Lee

15. Information
Management:
a proposal
circa 1989

17. Semantic
Web
published May 2001

18. Linked Data
image from lod-cloud.net

19. Solid

20. Core Concepts
Egocentric Architecture
Personal, mental augmentation
Self-centered storage
Networked collaboration
Cross (organizational) boundary linking
Co-edited knowledge web/graph
New types of content and
communication
Intertwingled data, content, annotations
Interdependent content vs.
resilient (lack of) retrieval
Transclusion vs. 404
Greater human flourishing through (easy) information access and
retrieval

21. Document
Centrism
No apps; No brands; “Pure” content
Easily creatable
Uniquely identifiable
Quickly retrievable
Cross-organizationally distributable
Intertwingled-able

22. What’s in the way?
“Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can
better review his shady past and analyze more
completely and objectively his present problems. He
has built a civilization so complex that he needs to
mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his
experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely
become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his
limited memory.”
– Vannevar Bush

23. Vannevar Bush’s parting warning
“The applications of science … may yet allow him
truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the
wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict
before he learns to wield that record for his true good.
Yet, in the application of science to the needs and
desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly
unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process,
or to lose hope as to the outcome.”
– Vannevar Bush

24. What’s next?
• Collaboration!
 Apache Annotator
 W3C Open Annotation CG
 Annotating All Knowledge
• More Egocentric Architecture
 Solid
 ActivityPub
 Web Annotation Protocol
 Atom/RSS
• Web Annotation for interop
• Build the memex you want to see in
the world.

25. Thanks!
bigbluehat.com
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