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Chapter 1. Connections Are Everything

In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything.

Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (1999), p. 14

The 20th century demonstrated how much we could achieve with spreadsheets and relational databases. Tabular data ruled. The 21st century has already shown us that that isn’t enough. Tables flatten our perspective, showing connections in only two dimensions. In the real world, things are related to and connected to a myriad of other things, and those relationships shape what is and what will happen. To gain full understanding, we need to model these connections.

Personal computers were introduced in the 1970s, but they didn’t take off until they found their first killer apps: financial spreadsheets. VisiCalc on the Apple II and then Lotus 1-2-3 on the IBM PC¹ automated the laborious and error-prone calculations that bookkeepers had been doing by hand ever since the invention of writing and arithmetic: adding up rows and columns of figures, and then perhaps performing even more complex statistical calculations.

In 1970, E. F. Codd published his seminal paper on the relational ...