Chapter 1. What Is Fluidinfo?
Fluidinfo is an online storage system in which there is a place for information about everything—everything that exists, everything that could exist, and everything that can be imagined. It allows anyone to store any information, about anything, in any digital form. And Fluidinfo makes it easy to find information in the system, and to extract it, using an unusually simple query language.
Fluidinfo is a first-class Internet citizen, exposing all its functionality through HTTP, the core protocol that underpins the World Wide Web. Programmers can take advantage of its RESTful API, which makes it easy to integrate with other applications.
Finally, Fluidinfo is social: users can exercise fine control over who can read their data and can even enable other chosen users and applications to write data on their behalf.
The Openly Writable World
One of the key aspects of Web 2.0 was the increasing writability of the Web. Although its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, always envisaged the Web as openly writable, in its early years there were many more readers than writers. The advent of blogging tools, social networks, user product reviews, and online data services have all contributed to a significant reduction in the asymmetry between Internet authors and consumers. Yet even today, the extent of the Web’s writability remains strictly limited.
The motivating concept behind Fluidinfo is to provide a shared data space where anyone can attach granular data of any kind to anything ...
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