Kindalab’s Blog

I don’t know about you but personally speaking, I have the feeling that a little something is missing in the Semantic Web as it is today. Both RDF and microformats aims to normalize data so that websites can communicate between each others. It would be a big step forward, similar to the invention of writing if you’d like, the Semantic Web becoming a kind of writing for computers. Notice the impact of writing for humanity and you’ll understand better the helplessness of computers which haven’t got it yet. If an isolated individual is not up to much, it is the same for the computer unable to communicate with its peers. Imagine the upcoming possibilities when computers would be able to “talk” to each others thanks to the semantic writing.

But in the end, it comes down to change the “World Wide Web” into a “World Wide Database“. It would be already a big step forward if we could get there, but I think we can go even further, as of right now, beyond the Semantic Web we could go directly to the “Object Oriented Web”. There is no need to search for this term on a search engine, because it doesn’t exist, at least not yet. This absurd idea occurred to me while I was reflecting about how to make decentralized social networks. I thought about data going from one person to another thanks to the “spreading” feature (see my previous post) and noticed that it could be interesting to join a certain number of functionalities to those data. Look at the blogs for instance, they usually have a “comment” feature and it would be interesting if this feature was available wherever the posts appear, whether it is on the original blog, a RSS aggregator like Google Reader, or a social network. Just consider the blog articles as objects capable of ubiquity composed of data (properties) as well as actions (methods) and you’ll start to envision what I mean by the “Object Oriented Web”.

In short, if the Semantic Web aims to establish standards for different type of data, the “Object Oriented Web” adds the possibility to normalize a certain number of actions. Beyond the “comment” feature applicable to almost any type of object, we can imagine many other possible actions. The first ones to come to my mind are: collaborative tags, vote feature “à la” Digg, “human translation” feature, system to flag malicious objects (illegal contents, spams, etc.), “buy” or “donate” features to remunerate the object’s authors, etc. All these elementary actions could be normalized in order to allow the portability of the objects and the interoperability of the services. When we purchase something in a store, it is convenient to be able to use different credit cards, Visa or American Express for instance, because the machine recording payments should always work. Likewise, it seems interesting to allow the interoperability of the new online payment services, because the customer should be able to choose between Paypal, Amazon FPS or Google Checkout. If this is so obvious for payment services, it should be the same for numerous other services more or less universal, such as those mentioned above: comments, tags, translations… For example, if the “comment” feature of WordPress doesn’t satisfy me, I’d like to use the one from CoComment, or any other service specialized in comments.

Clearly we should go towards the greatest interoperability as possible. Nevertheless it appears necessary to allow the authors of the posted objects to 1) define the possible actions on their objects, 2) control the services that will be in charge of these actions. The creator of a “music” object will authorize an action for receiving donations while refusing a specific donation service, because this last one would be against his deontology for instance. Conversely, an author could force a particular payment service because he gives a percentage of the amount to charities. Actually this freedom of choice should apply at different levels: 1) the objects authors, 2) intermediary services hosting the objects (social networks, blogs, online stores…) 3) people receiving the objects will themselves have access to a choice of actions and services, more or less various according to the choices made previously.

You should now have got a better idea of what I mean by “Object Oriented Web”, which is a concept that goes further than the Semantic Web, but that paradoxically seems to be easier to accomplish for leading to concrete applications relatively easy to apprehend. But how is this going to work? I cannot say exactly, all I have right now is the overall vision of a system allowing dematerialized things to spread on the web in a way that goes beyond the form, beyond semantic, like a powerful mix of data and actions giving objects their own existence. All that in the most open way possible while preserving freedom for authors, intermediates, and finally recipients like you and me, who receive and spread the different objects forming the web.

This is a translation of the article “Le Web Orienté Objet” originally written in French.