Towards a World Wide Database (WWDB)
Minding the Planet gives a deep and futuristic speculation about the Web to come:
I believe the next big leap for the Web is what I am calling “The World Wide Database.” The World Wide Database is a globally distributed network of data records that reside on millions of nodes around the network which collectively behaves as a giant virtual, decentralized database system. Google Base is an attempt to try to build such a database on a single node. But I don’t think that approach will ultimately become the WWDB. At best it will be a huge data silo, or many silos in one place.