The Future of the Semantic Web: Prototypes on a Global Distributed Filesystem

An important part of the Semantic Web vision is the idea that data is shared seamlessly and that world wide distributed, accessible, and interlinked knowledge bases can be created. However, the current incarnation of the Semantic Web falls short of this vision: while some necessary infrastructure (e.g., Linked Data) has been put in place, the current use of Linked Data in the Semantic Web is still happening in data silos, and sharing and reusing of knowledge is cumbersome and not straightforward. Recently the idea of prototypical objects was proposed to remedy this situation. This concept, known as Prototypes originates from early Frame systems and is also adopted in programming languages such as Javascript. In this vision paper we describe how a distributed file system forms a natural habitat for prototype knowledge representation, advancing the Semantic Web. In particular, we describe how we envision the deployment of Linked Data and Prototype Knowledge bases atop of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), which has several useful features matching the needs for knowledge representation based on prototypes.