Documents as Data, Data as Documents: What we learned about Semi-Structured Information for our Open World of Cloud & Devices

Abstract

Many of us always believed in a unique vision unifying documents and data through semantically-rich semi-structured information. This vision is even more critical today in our open interconnected world of Clouds and Devices. The last 20 years represents a real-life worldwide experiment in this area that fueled a massive set of market applications. In this talk, we review the history and trends of a lot of what is enabling today's core interchanges on the internet: from initial research adding document user interfaces to data, to the specification of structured documents, to the generalization of document markup techniques to the wide acceptance of document databases. We will also review our share of historical acronyms such as 'Star', 'Grif', 'OpenDoc', 'WorldWideWeb/Nexus', 'Amaya', 'InfoPath' 'HTML', 'SGML', 'XML', 'JSON', 'YAML', 'Markdown', 'Schema', 'Semantics','MongoDB', 'Hadoop', 'DocumentDB' and many others. We will then turn, cautiously and humbly, to the future and try to guess: what would the world need? And what do we need to think about to make it happen? We truly believe in the potential of the open Internet. We see pieces of information (that we once called "Diamonds of the Internet"), being created, shared, re-shaped, re-routed, modified by users or tiny small devices, understood through big data and machine learning, and processed by cloud services. We see the potential of fundamentally designing open platforms connected worldwide. By bridging technologies, we create higher level abstractions and thus more complex organisms (software) that can help everyone. But at the core remains the need for semi-structured open information fundamentally unifying documents and data.