But just as the earliest automobiles looked like horse carriages, reflecting outdated assump- tions about the way they would be used, information resources on the Web still resemble their physical predecessors. Although much information is already in structured form inside databases on the Web, such information is still flattened out for presentation, segmented into “pages,” and aggregated into separate “sites.” Anyone wishing to retain a piece of that information (originally a structured database record) must instead bookmark the entire containing page and continuously repeat the effort of locating that piece within the page. To collect several items spread across multiple.
