The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

5.8. Relationships in Organizing Systems

In the previous sections as we surveyed the five perspectives on analyzing relationships we mentioned numerous examples where relationships had important roles in organizing systems. In this final section we examine three contexts for organizing systems where relationships are especially fundamental; the Semantic Web and Linked Data, bibliographic organizing systems, and situations involving system integration and interoperability.

5.8.1. The Semantic Web and Linked Data

In a classic 2001 paper, Tim Berners-Lee laid out a vision of a Semantic Web in which all information could be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people.317[Web] The essential technologies for making the web more semantic and relationships among web resources more explicit are applications of XML, including RDF (§4.2.2.3, “Tagging of Web-based Resources”), and OWL (§5.3.3, “Ontologies”). Many tools have been developed to support more semantic encoding, but most still require substantial expertise in semantic technologies and web standards.318[Com]

[317][Web] (Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila, 2001) is the classic paper, and (Shadbolt, Hall, and Berners-Lee 2006) is something of a revisionist history.

Somewhat ironically, the web was not semantic from the beginning because Berners-Lee made a conscious decision to implement web documents using HTML, a presentation-oriented markup language, rather than require markup to be content-oriented. Designing ...