Foreword by James Hendler
Editor, Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web:
Theory and Technology
In 2009, I invited Aaron Swartz to contribute a "synthesis lecture"—essentially a short online book—to a new series I was editing on Web Engineering. Aaron produced a draft of about 40 pages, which is the document you see here. This was a "first version" to be extended later. Unfortunately, and much to my regret, that never happened.
The version produced by Aaron was not intended to be the finished product. He wrote this relatively quickly, and sent it to us for comments. I sent him a short set, and later Frank van Harmelen, who had joined as a coeditor of the series, sent a longer set. Aaron iterated with us for a bit, but then went on to other things and hadn't managed to finish.
With Aaron’s death in January, 2013, we decided it would be good to publish this so people could read, in his own words, his ideas about programming the Web, his ambivalence about different aspects of the Semantic Web technology, some thoughts on Openness, etc.
This document was originally produced in “markdown” format, a simplified HTML/Wiki format that Aaron co-designed with John Gruber ca. 2004. We used one of the many free markdown tools available on the Web to turn it into HTML, and then in turn went from there to Latex to PDF, to produce this document. This version was also edited to fix various copyediting errors to improve readability. An HTML version of the original is available at http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler/ProgrammableWebSwartz2009.html.
As a tribute to Aaron, Michael Morgan of Morgan & Claypool, the publisher of the series, and I have decided to publish it publicly at no cost. This work is licensed by Morgan & Claypool Publishers, http://www.morganclaypool.com, under a CC-BY-SA-NC license.
