The web’s original linking model treats a hyperlink as a one-to-one pointer between two resources. That simplicity has advantages, but it also limits how systems discover and represent indirect relationships, provenance chains, and aggregated context across decentralized platforms. nthlink proposes a practical extension: make links themselves structured, addressable objects that can express relationships at arbitrary “degrees” (first-degree, second-degree, nth-degree) and carry metadata that supports discovery, verification, and filtering.
Core ideas
- Links as objects: Instead of embedded raw URLs only, nthlink represents links as objects with fields such as source, target, relation-type, distance (degree), timestamp, and optional provenance signatures. This lets systems treat links like data they can index, query, and validate.
- Nth-degree relationships: nthlink explicitly encodes transitive relationships. A second-degree link can indicate “A references B that references C,” and an nth-degree entry can summarize longer chains or aggregate relationship paths for efficient discovery.
- Lightweight, extensible formats: nthlink is intended to be serialized in lightweight formats such as JSON-LD or compact JSON with vocabulary bindings, enabling easy integration into web APIs, content feeds, and knowledge-graph exports.
- Resolvers and filters: Small resolver services or client libraries can expand nthlink entries on demand, verify signatures, evaluate trust, and filter links by relation-type, degree, or provenance before returning results to applications.
Benefits
- Better discovery: By surfacing indirect relationships and precomputed N-degree paths, applications can discover relevant content faster without expensive graph traversals at query time.
- Provenance and trust: Embedding provenance metadata and optional cryptographic signatures in link objects helps consumers assess the authenticity and origin of relationships, which is critical for scholarly citations, news aggregation, and audit trails.
- Interoperability: As an object-based pattern, nthlink can be adopted gradually by APIs and feeds without changing existing URL semantics; systems simply start publishing link objects alongside resources.
- Reduced coupling: Decoupling links from page markup and treating them as addressable artifacts reduces fragility in federated systems and makes it easier to evolve linking policies.
Use cases
- Federated social platforms: summarize indirect mentions or shared contexts across instances without central indexing.
- Scholarly publishing: publish citation chains with provenance and degree annotations to speed literature discovery and reproducibility checks.
- Knowledge graphs and enterprise search: export link aggregates that speed query planning and relevance scoring.
- IoT and edge networks: advertise multi-hop relationships without requiring each node to maintain full topology.
Considerations
Adoption requires lightweight conventions for vocabularies, privacy controls to avoid exposing sensitive relationship paths, and performance strategies for managing large numbers of nthlinks. Nevertheless, by elevating links to first-class, structured objects, nthlink provides a pragmatic path to richer, more discoverable, and more trustworthy linking across decentralized systems.#1#