AnyLog: a grand unification of the Internet of things
The Web provides decentralised publishing and direct access to unstructured data (searching / querying that data has turned out to be a pretty centralised affair in practice though). AnyLog wants to do for structured (relational) data what the Web has done for unstructured data, with coordinators playing the role of search engines. A key challenge for a web of structured data is that it’s harder to see how it can be supported by advertising, so AnyLog needs a different incentive scheme. This comes in the form of micropayments. Micropayments require an environment of trust, and in a decentralised context that leads us to blockchains.
There have been several efforts to create a version of the WWW for "structured" data, such as the Semantic Web and Freebase. Our approach differs substantially by (1) providing economic incentives for data to be contributed and integrated into existing schemas, (2) offering a SQL interface instead of graph based approaches, (3) including the computational and storage infrastructure in the architectural vision.
Note that AnyLog also differs from projects such as DeepDive or Google’s Knowledge Graph. These aim at extracting structured data from existing web resources, AnyLog is concerned with providing access to structured data however it was obtained.
