I M A G E B Y G R A N D E D U C

a European nuclear capacity after the
devastation of the research infrastruc-
ture in World War II. 13 Similarly, the
original intentions for the Web were
to allow physicists to share data across
teams underpinned by an intellectual
commitment that information ‘wants
to be free.’ 8 Second, the Web merely of-
fered a set of opportunities for humans
to develop and populate information
constructs and link with each other.
Over time we have seen multiple and
and social. From this perspective, it is
so difficult to disentangle the social
from the technical that we describe the
Web as ‘sociotechnical.’ The Web has
been built on layers of communication
at different levels of abstraction, from
physical link layers (such as Ethernet)
over Internet and transport layers
(such as TCP/IP). It started as a Web of
Documents (HTML), which served as
the nucleus that other Webs would pig-
gyback on: a Web of Data (RDF, SPAR-
QL), a Web of Services (REST, JSON), a
Web of Things.a
All these layers are defined by un-
derlying technical standards and are
the result of sophisticated engineer-
ing. And they are also deeply social, in
two key ways. First, they have been de-
veloped in particular social contexts,
with social goals in mind. For exam-
ple, CERN was established to ensure
a https://www.w3.org/WoT/