Relational Data, the Semantic Web & Key Security Priorities
As the population of users on the world wide web expands at still astonishing rates, and “web 2.0″ —the social networking phenomenon, the integration of real open source innovation, and the free-services standard being pushed by Google— becomes the communicative norm, powerful new realms of innovation could be emerging that will become the third-generation Internet, or web 3.0. We need to understand fully how the interrelation of data and vital security interests can come together to give end-users the richest possible experience.
In October 2001, Tim Berners-Lee —inventor of the world wide web’s foundational protocols— wrote an essay entitled “Business Model for the Semantic Web: Enterprise Application Integration and other stories“, in which he laid out some of the key problems involved in building an Internet that not only facilitates sharing data across distinct networking systems, but which can also “comprehend” and synthesize data for the benefit of the end user.
Among the problems with executing such an information-blending service we face the following: consistent accurate repetition of data, consistent accurate relational linkage of data, data security, global virtual encryption, re-partitioning of geographical and personal data for the public side of such systems, and global access and control of data for the end user. Add to this the problem of compatibility not only of encryption format but of information layout and tagging, across systems, and we have a labyrinthine task of collaboration which large institutions are still ill-suited to carry out.
The strength, however, of the world wide web is open systems. As ideas and problem-solving solutions compete across a spreading community of researchers and commentators, the are refined, advanced, and innovations emerge which follow a logic not visible from within large, closed institutions with payroll development teams. Harnessing these communities, building their open format into what some web visionaries call “ideagoras”, open markets for ideas primed to produce optimal pace for innovation, will allow us to “fix” the likely gaps in any integrated semantic web system, before it is widely adopted.
According to Berners-Lee, these dispersed web communities are in fact the platform for the semantic web, and their integration and their application to relational data and personal data security are key to the process of standardization needed to enable a dispersed, de-centralized semantic web:
This is done with standards, which is what the World Wide Web Consortium is all about. We are not inventing relational models for data, or query systems or rule-based systems. We are just webizing them. We are just allowing them to work together in a decentralized system - without a human having to custom handcraft every connection.
We will begin to see tagging and labeling of tags, with multiple layers of categorization and author-committed relational presets, all of which will permit pro-active databases, searching for information to aggregate to their contents, to accurately scan and interconnect sites, products and services, based solely on the relative interest expressed by a given site or online operation’s other contents, tie-ins and tags. The semantic web will, at this point of mounting automatic interconnection, require dynamic new security solutions that ensure access to information without exposure to unwanted executable risks.
The semantic web, if properly imagined, will not need to be about “harvesting” information, but simply locating connections. If this is the case, then each individual user should be able to ensure a top level of security for sensitive information, so long as that information is properly identified by the user as sensitive and major online institutions (like banks, universities, government or corporate employers) do not expose sensitive information on their end.
admin @ July 2, 2008