Vision

Hypothetical desk-sized device for storing books, records and letters on microfilm and joining them into 'associative trails'. It was never built.

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.

Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a Web whose data carries machine-readable meaning, built on standards such as RDF and OWL.

Physical objects that identify themselves and report data over networks without people typing it in; the term was coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999 about RFID in supply chains.

Tim Berners-Lee's diagram of the Semantic Web as layers, first shown in his XML 2000 keynote in December 2000: Unicode and URIs at the base, then XML, RDF and RDF Schema, an ontology vocabulary, logic, proof and trust, with digital signatures alongside. W3C redrew it as standards arrived, adding query and rules.

Program that acts on a person's behalf, for example finding and booking a service; the payoff promised by the 2001 Scientific American article.

Paul Otlet's treatise on organising documents and knowledge, setting out the field he called documentation.

Essay in The Atlantic Monthly imagining machines that extend human memory, including the memex, a desk for storing records and linking them by association.

John McCarthy's 1959 paper proposing the 'advice taker', a program that would decide what to do by deducing it from facts and rules stated in formal logic; the founding statement of logic-based knowledge representation.

Douglas Engelbart's 1962 SRI report setting out a research programme to use computers to extend human problem-solving, which led to NLS.

Ted Nelson's self-published two-sided book explaining computers to the public and setting out his ideas for hypertext and Xanadu.

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.

Tim Berners-Lee's proposal to CERN management for a linked information system. It became the World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee's 1998 Design Issues note giving a high-level plan for the architecture of the Semantic Web.

Tim Berners-Lee's account of how he created the World Wide Web, ending with his plans for a Semantic Web.

Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila describing software agents that act on machine-readable meaning published on the Web.

August 2007 essay by Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon arguing that the map of who knows whom should be an open, shared asset rather than locked inside each social network.

Aaron Swartz's unfinished short book on Semantic Web ideas, published after his death in 2013.

Brewster Kahle's talk to the NetGain gathering at the Ford Foundation. He argues that the Web is fragile and lets readers be tracked and censored, that 'the way we code the Web will determine the way we live online', and calls for a peer-to-peer Web with no central host.

Survey proposing three ways to combine language models and knowledge graphs: KG-enhanced LLMs, LLM-augmented KGs, and the two working together.

October 2026 paper by the W3C Strategy Team, prepared by Philippe Le Hégaret, on how the Web's standards must change as AI agents act for users: agents prefer text and structured data to HTML, JSON-LD, RDF, DCAT and ODRL become more valuable as inputs and guardrails for agents, and Verifiable Credentials and DIDs can identify agents and whom they act for.