# Information Management: A Proposal

Berners-Lee's CERN memo proposing a decentralized web of typed nodes and links — the document the World Wide Web grew from.

## Summary

[Berners-Lee](/wiki/berners-lee.md)'s memo starts from a concrete institutional problem: CERN was losing information as people rotated through, and neither hierarchical trees (CERNDOC, file systems) nor keyword search could model how the organisation actually worked — "a multiply connected web whose interconnections evolve with time." His answer was a linked information system: nodes for people, projects, concepts, and documents, joined by typed links, generalizing his earlier *Enquire* program. The design requirements read as a founding charter — remote access across networks, heterogeneity across systems, private links over public information, gateways into existing data, and above all **non-centralisation**: systems must link together "without requiring any central control or coordination." The proposed architecture separates display software from storage behind a defined interface — the client/server split the Web still runs on.

## Why it matters

This is the Web's point of origin, and its most striking property is that decentralization was a stated requirement, not an accident — no permission needed to publish or link. The Independent Internet argues that this founding property eroded through the Web 2.0 era and must be deliberately rebuilt; see [decentralization](/wiki/decentralization.md) and [decentralization across the lineage](/wiki/decentralization-across-the-lineage.md). The proposal also anticipated machine-readable meaning: typed links ("depends on", "made", "refers to") that software could analyze — an idea Berners-Lee returned to in [the Semantic Web](/wiki/semantic-web.md), and one the [LLM-maintained wiki](/wiki/llm-maintained-wiki.md) realizes in a new form: a linked knowledge system that grows and evolves with the organisation it describes.

> Part of the AP0110.ORG source library. See the [wiki overview](/wiki.md).

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*Full source text: [read the original document](/docs/information-management-proposal.md).*