We need to ensure that our information is freely accessible, and that the links between this information – this new format of linked knowledge – remains accessible, searchable, and explorable. Traditionally public libraries have filled this role in our society, acting as guardians who provide unbiased and unfettered access to knowledge. But the libraries of today were not built to house this new kind of live, linked knowledge, nor were they intended to be accessed by both humans and machines.

We need a new kind of public library – where linked knowledge is easily accessible not just to us, but to the next generation of knowledge-based applications.

Better links help everyone, and ideally such a library or the features that enable it would be supported by standards bodies like the W3C, built into modern web browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox, and added to search engines like Google. But there’s no indication that will happen anytime soon. And we’re not waiting around.

At Wayfinder we’ve spent the past few years thinking about how linking and knowledge exploration on the web could work. We’ve studied the original proposals for linking on the web, and built new tools that enable anyone to publicly link content they find in a simple way. What’s special about this is that now curious readers – not just authors – can easily map knowledge and have a say in how the web is connected, without the burden of writing yet another piece of content. And as these tools lower the barrier to connect information, they’re being used to voice opinions, share inspiration, and explain ideas in a handful of languages around the world.

A 1965 schematic by Ted Nelson, illustrating parallel documents in Xanadu.

But it’s not enough. We can’t fix linking just by giving more people the ability to create public links. We need to create a better infrastructure for housing, accessing, and exploring those links. An infrastructure that’s built not just for people, but for the next generation of education, news, and recommendation apps.

To do so we’re building a new open database and API – a public library – that developers can access to create, augment, and query for webpages and their related links. Imagine a world where a link placed in this essay referencing an Atlantic article would be immediately visible to Atlantic readers, and instantly added to a public database that the Atlantic and other apps could easily access. Such a design would reduce the ability for any one company to control what we see, and increase our ability to freely and deeply explore the things we want to know most about.

These ideas around connected knowledge, imagined for centuries, have never before been so possible or so crucial to build. If you’re a developer, we’d love your feedback on how this database and API should work.