Learning from the Web will be five (5) years old this coming December.
Alan Bosworth (then VP of Engineering at Google) outlines eight (8) lessons from the Web.
In brief:
- Simple, relaxed, sloppily extensible text formats and protocols often work better than complex and efficient binary ones.
- It is worth making things simple enough that one can harness Moore’s law in parallel.
- It is acceptable to be stale much of the time.
- The wisdom of crowds works amazingly well.
- People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs).
- Pay attention to physics.
- Be as loosely coupled as possible.
- KISS. Keep it (the design) simple and stupid.
You will need to read the article to get the full flavor of the lessons.
His comments on how databases have failed to heed almost all the lessons of the web is interesting in light of the recent surge of NoSQL projects.
After you read the article, ask yourself how topic maps has or has not heeded the lessons of the web? If you think not, what would it take for topic maps to heed the lessons of the web?