Preface

We love the Web and we love the way it’s evolving from the rather simple web of linked documents of the early 1990s into the framework for the world’s information. Representing data on the Web is an obvious, but slightly harder, next step.

We each came to the Web in our own ways but came to Linked Data nearly together. David found the Web as a programmer and later as an entrepreneur, Marsha as an educator, and Luke as a student. Marsha and David are old enough to have started computing with punch cards and paper tape. The Web was a very welcome degree of abstraction from ones and zeros.

David was introduced to the Web at Digital Equipment Corporation’s fabled Western Research Lab in California in 1993. It was an eye-opener. One of the first large websites showed photos of thousands of pieces of artwork held by the Vatican. Another showed a list of projects that Digital researchers were working on and linked to each of their own individual web servers for detailed documents. David was hooked. Tellingly, it was the project website that he found most interesting. If only you could link into databases and spreadsheets the way you could link to documents.