Alex Wright

Today's Times is running my piece on the Deep Web, the largely invisible realm of content stored in databases that doesn't show up in a typical Google search.

I've written about the Deep Web a few times over the years, starting with this 2004 piece for Salon.com. This topic seems to keep piquing my interest because it relates to one of my favorite hobby horses: the limitations of the document-centric Web.

As I argued in my book, today's Web is in many ways a simplistic version of the more sophisticated data-driven hypertext systems imagined by folks like Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Andries Van Dam. In principle, the Deep Web could open the door to a far more dynamic Web with a very different user experience. But the technical hurdles are imposing, and designers have yet to scratch the surface of what a more data-driven Web might look like.

I'm particularly interested in the possibilities of the Deep Web as a viable alternative to the Semantic Web. While the Semantic Web has stumbled in part due to the onerous requirements of hand-drawn ontologies, the Deep Web could potentially offer a structured data set that could fulfill many of the same needs. I didn't have the runway to discuss this in sufficience detail in the Times piece, but I did explore this theme in more detail in a piece I wrote last year for Communications of the ACM.

For more background, allow me to recommend a few folks who are thinking deeply (so to speak) about these questions:

Juliana Freire
Alon Helevy
Mike Bergman
Kosmix
Danny Sullivan

Previously: Mush, eh?

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