Principle

'Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things': Waldo Tobler's 1970 principle, which underlies spatial interpolation and much of geographic reasoning.

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.

Global name for any resource, from a web page to a person or an idea; the foundation the rest of the stack builds on. IRIs extend URIs to Unicode.

Way of publishing data on the Web with URIs, HTTP and RDF, so that data sets link to one another the way documents do.

Linked Data published under an open licence. Berners-Lee's 2010 five-star scheme rates open data from 'available in any format' up to 'linked to other data'.

Principles that research data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, published in Scientific Data in March 2016.

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.

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.

URI that can be looked up over HTTP to get data about the thing it names, which in turn links to further URIs: 'follow your nose'.

The rule that a fact missing from the data is unknown, not false. RDF and OWL assume it, unlike most databases.

The right to have personal information removed from search results or erased by those who hold it, established for search engines by the EU Court of Justice in 2014 and as the right to erasure in Article 17 of the GDPR.

Approach to digital identity in which people hold and control their own identifiers and credentials instead of relying on a central provider.

Links that both ends know about, so a document can show what links to it. Central to Xanadu; the Web's links are one-way.

Paul Baran's 1964 RAND memorandum comparing centralized, decentralized and distributed networks, and showing that a distributed network survives attacks on its nodes and links far better than a centralized one.

1970 paper by Waldo Tobler in Economic Geography, a computer animation of Detroit's growth, in which he states the first law of geography.

Levesque and Brachman's 1987 paper showing that reasoning gets dramatically harder as a representation language gets more expressive, and that this trade-off underlies the differences between existing representation formalisms.

Tim Berners-Lee's 1998 note arguing that a URI, once published, should keep working indefinitely, and that breaking links is a choice made by poor design rather than an accident of technology.

1999 book by Lawrence Lessig on how the Internet is regulated, arguing that software architecture ('code') constrains behaviour much as law, markets and norms do.

Roy Fielding's 2000 doctoral dissertation at UC Irvine, which defined REST, the architectural style of the Web: resources named by URIs, manipulated through representations over a uniform interface. Most Web APIs since claim descent from it.

W3C policy adopted on 5 February 2004 so that its Recommendations can be implemented on a royalty-free basis: participants commit to license patents essential to a specification without charge.

Tim Berners-Lee's short Design Issues note setting out four rules for publishing data on the Web with URIs and links.

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.

Principles written by thirty open-government advocates meeting in Sebastopol, California, on 7–8 December 2007: government data should be complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine-processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary and licence-free.

2008 Communications of the ACM article by Weitzner, Abelson, Berners-Lee, Feigenbaum, Hendler and Sussman arguing that the Web should make the use of information accountable to rules, rather than rely on hiding and access control alone.

2009 book by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger arguing that digital memory has made forgetting the exception, and proposing expiration dates for stored information.

Tim Berners-Lee's 2010 Scientific American essay defending the Web's design principles, including decentralization, and warning that large social-networking sites were walling users' information off from the rest of the Web.

Book by Tom Heath and Christian Bizer setting out the Linked Data principles and how to publish and use Linked Data.

Google blog post by Amit Singhal announcing the Knowledge Graph, which brought the term into wide use.

Judgment of the EU Court of Justice of 13 May 2014 (C-131/12) holding that search engines must, on request, remove links to information about a person that is inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.

Christopher Allen's essay setting out ten principles for digital identity controlled by the individual.

Ink & Switch essay setting out seven ideals for software that keeps data on users' devices while still allowing real-time collaboration.

Five principles for a decentralized web, written by the DWeb community with dozens of contributors from technology, organizing, academia, policy and the arts: technology for human agency, distributed benefits, mutual respect, humanity and ecological awareness. First shown at the February 2021 DWeb meetup and offered as 'a starting point, not an end point'.

Report of the W3C workshop held in London in July 2026, which reached consensus on a new W3C Working Group for ODRL 3.0: policies that are machine-actionable across sectors, with stronger formal semantics, conformance rules and a test suite, working with standards for identity, provenance, legal information and data spaces.