From Floating Data to The Ground You Stand On: Creating an Internet of Places
The World Wide Web was originally created as a web of connected documents. What if that's no longer an appropriate, or sufficient, metaphor? A group of geospatial data specialists today published a call …
Context & Ripple Effects
This call lands mid-way through a debate the corpus has been running for years: whether the web stays a web of documents or becomes a web of addressable data. Read/WriteWeb's own 2007 argument that web sites become web services and Publishing 2.0's case for data as the future of the web already attacked the document metaphor from the services side; today a group of geospatial specialists attacks it from the spatial side.
First-order effects
- The geospatial community now has a named position — an Internet of Places — rather than scattered projects, forcing standards bodies and mapping platforms to treat location as a candidate first-class addressable object alongside URLs.
Second-order effects
- Search engines and mapping providers whose indexes are built around documents and pages face pressure to expose stable place-level identifiers, or cede that layer to whoever builds it.
Third-order effects
- If physical locations gain durable digital addresses, control of the geographic registry layer becomes a chokepoint in its own right — the same concentration question raised by earlier calls like Take Back the Web! over who governs the web's addressing system.
The trend: The web's unit of address is migrating from the document toward the entity — first data and services, now places — and each step raises the same governance fight over who owns the identifier layer.