Giant Global Graph (GGG) is a name coined in 2007 by

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...

to help distinguish between the nature and significance of the content on the existing

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

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

hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to Data (computing), data by a user (computing), user's point and click, clicking or touchscreen, tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to ...

s. Next-generation Web 3.0 information designs go beyond the discrete

web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...

s of previous generations by emphasizing the

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

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 The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

Social networking service A social networking service (SNS), or social networking site, is a type of online social media platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interest ...

s 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 a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

. In the ideal future of the

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

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 and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. For instance, people using the FOAF 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 study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

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 plain text, text-heavy, but may contain data such ...

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

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

social network A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...

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

, 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" 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 2007 neologisms

History

See also

References