◆ Semantic Web Catalogue

Design issue

Topology

Where does data live, and who hosts it?

tension
Centralized convenience against decentralized control, after Paul Baran's 1964 distinction between centralized, decentralized and distributed networks.
also
Location, Hosting, Decentralization
scheme
design issues

Threads (5)

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

  • Central against decentralized 1964–2026 open 12 steps

    Where should data live: with a few large hosts, or with the people and groups it belongs to?

  • 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?

  • Who controls data about me? 2002–2026 open 8 steps

    Can people decide what happens to data about them, and can machines read and respect those decisions?

  • Who issues your name online? 2000–2026 open 11 steps

    Should people be known online by accounts that platforms issue, or by names they control themselves?

  • Who vouches for it? 1991–2022 open 9 steps

    How can a reader tell whether a claim on the Web is true, and whose word to take for it?

Who answered it

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

traditionworksearliest
Hypertext
Knowledge representation
Databases
Machine learning
Web standards 4 Long Live the Web 2010
Search
Social web 6 Thoughts on the Social Graph 2007
Open knowledge
Decentralized web 16 On Distributed Communications: Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks 1964
Libraries, archives and museums
Life sciences
Media
Geospatial
Commerce and supply chain
Government and law
Finance
Industry and engineering

3 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. 2 entries have no date and are not shown. Hover over or focus an entry to draw its links. Scroll sideways, or use the decades above.

Lineage (17)

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

Concepts 2

  • Local-first software 2019 concept principle

    Software that keeps the primary copy of a user's data on their own devices and syncs it with others, so it works offline and the user keeps ownership.

  • Personal data store concept technique

    Storage that a person controls, from which applications read and write data with permission, instead of each application keeping its own copy.

Writings 7

Standards 3

  • ActivityPub 2018 standard ★ seminal

    W3C Recommendation (2018) for decentralised social networking, used by Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. Its messages are Activity Streams 2.0 in JSON-LD, so the Fediverse runs on Linked Data.

  • AT Protocol 2022 standard

    Protocol behind Bluesky. Every account is a DID with a domain name as its handle. Its schema language, Lexicon, deliberately avoids RDF and JSON-LD in favour of strict, versioned schemas.

  • Linked Web Storage Protocol 2026 standard

    W3C specification, a first public draft since March 2026, for giving applications secure, permissioned access to data people store elsewhere, in an interoperable way.

Projects 5

  • IndieWeb 2011 project

    Community, started with the first IndieWebCamp in 2011, of people who publish on their own domains and connect sites with open standards such as microformats and Webmention, instead of relying on platforms.

  • Solid c. 2015 project ★ seminal

    Tim Berners-Lee's project for storing personal data in user-controlled 'pods' that apps read and write through Linked Data standards.

  • IPFS 2015 project

    Peer-to-peer system for storing and sharing files addressed by their content hash, created by Juan Benet; the alpha was released in February 2015.

  • DWeb 2016 project

    Community of the people, projects and protocols building a decentralized web. It grew out of Brewster Kahle's 2015 call to 'lock the Web open': the Internet Archive held Decentralized Web Summits in 2016 and 2018, then DWeb Camp from 2019, with local nodes in cities worldwide.

  • Bluesky 2019 project

    Decentralised social network built on AT Protocol. It began in 2019 as a research initiative announced by Jack Dorsey at Twitter and became independent in 2021.

Also bears on this (13)

Concepts 2

  • Web of trust 1992 concept principle

    Decentralised trust model in which people vouch for each other's keys instead of relying on a central authority; put forward by Phil Zimmermann for PGP in 1992.

  • Content addressing concept technique

    Naming data by a cryptographic hash of its content instead of by where it is stored. It is the main alternative to location-based URIs: the name says what a thing is, not where it lives.

Standards 4

  • RSS 1999 standard ★ seminal

    Family of XML formats for syndicating site updates. Netscape's RSS 0.90 (1999) and RSS 1.0 were RDF-based; RSS 2.0 is plain XML.

  • Webmention 2017 standard

    W3C Recommendation (2017) for telling any URL that you have linked to it. The receiving site checks that the link really exists and can then show it, giving the Web's one-way links a way back.

  • Decentralized Identifiers 2022 standard ★ seminal

    W3C specification for identifiers that their subject can create and control without a central registry. DID 1.0 became a Recommendation in July 2022; DID 1.1 reached Candidate Recommendation in March 2026.

  • Model Context Protocol 2024 standard

    Open protocol introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 for connecting AI models to external tools and data sources; donated to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation in December 2025.

Projects 7

  • World Wide Web 1990 project ★ seminal

    Hypertext system of documents linked by URLs and served over HTTP, built by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN from 1990.

  • Pretty Good Privacy 1991 project ★ seminal

    Email and file encryption program released by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. Instead of a central certificate authority, users vouch for each other's keys, the model its 1992 manual named the web of trust.

  • Facebook 2004 project

    Social network launched in February 2004. Its profiles, pages and 'Log in with Facebook' made a Facebook account a de facto identifier for people and organizations, and its Open Graph protocol turned web pages into objects in its own graph.

  • PRISM 2007 project

    US National Security Agency programme, begun in 2007, that collected internet communications from major US companies including Google, Facebook and Apple; disclosed in June 2013 from documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

  • INSPIRE 2007 project

    EU directive of 14 March 2007 requiring member states to publish their environmental spatial data in common, interoperable forms, building a shared European spatial data infrastructure.

  • Europeana 2008 project

    European Union portal to the digitised collections of thousands of cultural heritage institutions, launched in November 2008; it aggregates their metadata with the Europeana Data Model and publishes it as Linked Open Data.

  • Log in with Facebook 2008 project

    Facebook's sign-in for other sites, unveiled as Facebook Connect in July 2008 and generally available from December 2008, which made a Facebook account a login across the Web.

People and organizations (29)

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

Bluesky Social PBC (2) · Brewster Kahle (2) · Daniel Holmgren (2) · Internet Archive (2) · Juan Benet (2) · Martin Kleppmann (2) · Paul Frazee (2) · Tim Berners-Lee (2) · World Wide Web Consortium (2) · Aaron Parecki · Adam Wiggins · Amy Guy · Brad Fitzpatrick · Christine Lemmer-Webber · David Recordon · Erin Shepherd · Evan Prodromou · Ink & Switch · Jay Graber · Jessica Tallon · Kevin Marks · Mai Ishikawa Sutton · Mark McGranaghan · Mastercard · Paul Baran · Peter van Hardenberg · Protocol Labs · Tantek Çelik · Wendy Hanamura