Giant Global Graph (GGG) is a name coined in 2007 by Tim Berners-Lee to help distinguish between the nature and significance of the content on the existing

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

and that of a promulgated next-generation web, presumptively named Web 3.0. In common usage, "World Wide Web" refers primarily to a web of discrete information objects readable by human beings, with functional linkages provided between them by human-created hyperlinks. Next-generation Web 3.0 information designs go beyond the discrete web pages of previous generations by emphasizing the metadata which describe information objects like web pages and attribute the relationships that conceptually or ''semantically'' link the information objects to each other. Additionally, Web 3.0 technologies and designs enable the organization of entirely new kinds of human- and machine-created data objects. An important related concept that overlaps with Giant Global Graph without fully encompassing it is that of the Semantic Web. Social networking services are one of the earliest and best-known examples of this distinction. In a Social Network, the information about relationships between people, and the kinds of data objects those people share, is at least as important as the data objects themselves. Plus, participants in a Social Network create new kinds of data that did not exist on the web before, such as their ''Likes'' for other people's comments and content. Currently, these new kinds of data are primarily

structured Structuring, also known as smurfing in banking jargon, is the practice of executing financial transactions such as making bank deposits in a specific pattern, calculated to avoid triggering financial institutions to file reports required by law ...

and mediated by the proprietary systems of companies like

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

. In the ideal future of the

decentralized Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. Conce ...

Giant Global Graph or Semantic Web, such information would be structured in such a way that it could be readable by many different systems and dynamically organized into many different user-readable formats. The GGG concept also relates to the Decentralization of Internet Information, whereby properly-formatted semantic web data objects can be organized and their relationships discerned by any computer on the Internet, rather than solely being organized by large centralized systems such as Facebook and

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

. For instance, people using the

FOAF FOAF (an acronym of friend of a friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe soc ...

protocol to organize information on websites or other Internet nodes can define and interact with their social networks without necessarily requiring the intervention of centralized systems like Facebook. Crucially, where the term ''Web 3.0'' refers to a suite of technologies and to a particular phase in the development of the web, the term ''Giant Global Graph'' is intended to refer more generally to the total environment of information that will be generated and sustained through the implementation of these technologies. This environment will be a qualitatively different one than that which existed before the development of these technologies. As of 2017, anticipated progress toward a pervasive semantic web has been side-tracked by the widespread application of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

technologies to process existing,

unstructured data Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, num ...

and content, and that it is no longer clear whether a Web 3.0 epoch will materialize as originally envisioned.

History

The term ''Giant Global Graph'' was notably used the first time by the inventor of the

, Tim Berners-Lee, on his blog. Tim Berners-Lee thinks about the

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...

itself that is inside and between social-network Web sites such as

. He assumes that people can use the word "Graph" to distinguish these from the "Web". Then he says that, although he called this graph the Semantic Web, maybe it should have been called the "Giant Global Graph". "GGG" has been used several times by Berners-Lee and by others in other blogs. GGG may be described as the content plus pointers of the WWW transitioning to content plus pointers plus relationships plus descriptions. Significantly, the Giant Global Graph concept seems to have been a significant input in Facebook's concept and name for their "

Open Graph The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook. The current Facebook ...

" project and protocol, which is their effort to spread their approach to social networking beyond the bounds of the Facebook website, allowing a broader network or "graph" of connections between Facebook users, and between Facebook users and the Internet data objects which interest them.

References

{{Social networking Social networks Semantic Web 1990s neologisms

History

See also

References