Sustainability

Who pays for it, and for how long?

tension: Launch against upkeep: projects, public endpoints and vocabularies that outlive, or do not outlive, the grant or the company that paid for them.
also: Funding, Business model, Maintenance
scheme: design issues

Threads (5)

Long-running problems under this issue, told step by step. All threads.

Who pays for public data infrastructure? 1995–2025 open 9 steps
Who pays to keep shared identifiers, query services and knowledge bases running after the launch money is spent?
Can the Web forget? 1998–2019 open 8 steps
Should what is published about a person stay findable forever, or can they have it removed?
Names that outlive their hosts 1994–2022 open 9 steps
How can a name keep working after the server, the company or the domain behind it is gone?
Who owns what the crowd built? 1998–2025 open 8 steps
When volunteers build a database together, what stops whoever hosts it from closing it, selling it or shutting it down?
Who runs the registry? 1957–2026 open 10 steps
When everyone depends on one set of identifiers, who issues them, on what terms, and what happens when the registry runs out, changes hands or closes its code?

Who answered it

This issue's row of the map: which traditions' works mainly answer it, and the earliest from each.

Works on this issue by tradition
tradition	works	earliest
Hypertext
Knowledge representation
Databases
Machine learning
Web standards	1	PURL 1995
Search	1	From Freebase to Wikidata: The Great Migration 2016
Social web	1	Myspace 2003
Open knowledge	4	Wayback Machine 2001
Decentralized web
Libraries, archives and museums	4	PURL 1995
Life sciences
Media	1	Myspace 2003
Geospatial	2	Kessler syndrome 1978
Commerce and supply chain
Government and law
Finance
Industry and engineering

7 of 17 traditions have taken up this question as a work's main issue; a work in several traditions counts in each. Same counts as the full map.

Timeline

Works on this question, its main or a secondary one, each shown once in date order; filter by tradition to follow one community. Bars run from start to end where both are known; marks people, projects and organizations still active. Hover over or focus an entry to draw its links. Scroll sideways, or use the decades above.

Lineage (9)

Works whose main question this is, by type, oldest first.

Concepts 1

Kessler syndrome 1978 concept vision
The risk that debris in low Earth orbit reaches a density where collisions create more debris faster than it decays, making orbits unusable: a tragedy of the commons in space.

Writings 5

Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt 1978 writing ★ seminal vision
1978 paper by Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais in the Journal of Geophysical Research predicting that collisions in low Earth orbit would come within decades and that debris would overtake meteoroids as the main hazard by about 2000.
Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice 2006 writing ★ seminal principle
Book edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom applying Ostrom's research on how communities sustain shared resources to knowledge: digital libraries, open access, open-source software and the rules that keep them from being depleted or enclosed.
Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot 2014 writing ★ seminal
2014 PLoS ONE study of millions of web links in scholarly articles, finding that about one in five articles cites web resources that have since vanished or changed: link rot measured at scale.
Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure 2016 writing ★ seminal
Nadia Eghbal's 2016 report for the Ford Foundation arguing that open-source software is public infrastructure, maintained by a few unpaid or underpaid people, and that nobody has taken responsibility for funding it.
From Freebase to Wikidata: The Great Migration 2016 writing ★ seminal
WWW 2016 paper on moving Freebase's data into Wikidata after Google announced in December 2014 that it would close Freebase: what could be carried over, what could not, and why a company's knowledge base did not simply transfer to a community one.

Standards 1

PURL 1995 standard ★ seminal
Persistent Uniform Resource Locator: a web address that points at a resolver instead of the resource, so the target can move without breaking links. OCLC introduced it in 1995 and ran purl.org, where Dublin Core and many other vocabularies keep their namespaces, until it handed the service to the Internet Archive in September 2016.

Projects 2

Wayback Machine 2001 project ★ seminal
The Internet Archive's public archive of the Web, open since 25 October 2001 and built from crawls going back to 1996; for many dead links and vanished sites it is the only copy left, kept by a nonprofit funded mainly by donations and grants.
Myspace 2003 project
Social network launched in 2003 that dominated the late 2000s and became where many musicians hosted their songs. In 2019 it confirmed that about 50 million songs uploaded before 2015 were lost in a server migration.

Also bears on this (16)

Concepts 1

CC signals 2025 concept principle
Framework proposed by Creative Commons in June 2025 for dataset holders to state, in machine-readable form, how they want their content reused by AI systems; partly legal and partly a social expectation.

Writings 3

SPARQL Web-Querying Infrastructure: Ready for Action? 2013 writing ★ seminal
ISWC 2013 paper that monitored hundreds of public SPARQL endpoints and found many of them often unavailable, slow, or limited in what they would answer: evidence that free public query services were hard to keep running.
An Ontological Architecture for Orbital Debris Data 2015 writing formalism
2015 paper by Robert Rovetto in Earth Science Informatics presenting an ontological architecture for data on orbital debris and space situational awareness.
Triple Pattern Fragments: A Low-cost Knowledge Graph Interface for the Web 2016 writing ★ seminal technique
2016 Journal of Web Semantics paper proposing Triple Pattern Fragments: servers answer only simple triple patterns and clients do the rest of the query, trading some speed for servers that are cheap to run and stay up.

Projects 12

Cyc 1984 project ★ seminal
Long-running project to hand-encode common-sense knowledge as a logical knowledge base, started at MCC and continued by Cycorp.
CelesTrak 1985 project
T. S. Kelso's service, begun as a bulletin board in 1985, that republishes the US military's satellite catalogue and orbital elements for the public; it is now a non-profit.
CDDB c. 1993 project
Database of CD track listings, started by Ti Kan around 1993 and filled by users who believed it would stay free. It was sold in 1998, renamed Gracenote in 2000 and moved to proprietary terms, which provoked the freedb fork and MusicBrainz.
DAML 1999 project
DARPA research programme started in 1999 by Jim Hendler to create machine-readable representations for the Web; its RDF-based DAML language fed directly into OWL.
MusicBrainz 2000 project ★ seminal
Open, volunteer-edited database of music metadata, launched in 2000 in reaction to CDDB's enclosure. Its core data has been in the public domain since 2003, and its identifiers anchor the Music Ontology, BBC Music and Wikidata's music items.
Discogs 2000 project
User-built database of music releases and marketplace, launched in November 2000; it lists every pressing and edition, with more than 19 million releases by 2026.
OpenStreetMap 2004 project ★ seminal
Volunteer-made map of the world, started in 2004 because Britain's Ordnance Survey would not release its data under a free licence. Its features carry free-form key=value tags, a folksonomy steered by a wiki, and its data moved to the share-alike ODbL in 2012.
Freebase 2007–2016 project ★ seminal
Collaboratively edited knowledge graph built by Metaweb and bought by Google in 2010. It fed Google's Knowledge Graph, and its data was offered to Wikidata when it closed in 2016.
w3id.org 2013 project
Permanent URL redirect service run by the W3C Permanent Identifier Community Group since 2013. Anyone can claim a path by pull request and point it wherever their data lives; a consortium of organisations has pledged to keep it running.
Rebooting the Web of Trust 2015–2023 project
Series of design workshops on decentralised identity and trust, started by Christopher Allen in 2015, whose collaboratively written papers fed into DIDs and Verifiable Credentials. The twelfth was held in Cologne in September 2023; the thirteenth, planned for October 2024, was cancelled for lack of support, and the papers now survive on GitHub.
Wikidata Query Service 2015 project
Public SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata, run by the Wikimedia Foundation since 2015. In May 2025 it moved scholarly articles into a separate graph because its Blazegraph backend could no longer keep up with Wikidata's size.
Digital Product Passport 2024 project
EU scheme under the 2024 Ecodesign Regulation giving products a digital record of what they are made of and how to repair and recycle them, reached through a QR code; batteries are first, from February 2027, and an EU registry opened in July 2026.

People and organizations (17)

Linked to works on this question; the number counts those works.

Internet Archive (2) · Brewster Kahle · Bruce Gilliat · Burton G. Cour-Palais · Charlotte Hess · Denny Vrandečić · Donald J. Kessler · Elinor Ostrom · Erik Jul · Lydia Pintscher · Martin Klein · Nadia Eghbal · OCLC · Sebastian Schaffert · Stuart Weibel · Thomas Pellissier Tanon · Thomas Steiner