Freely Downloadable under Creative Commons License: The Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work by Aaron Swartz

Dear Friends,

In 2009, we invited Aaron Swartz to contribute a short work to our series on Web Engineering (now The Semantic Web: Theory and Technology). He produced a draft of about 40 pages -- a "first version" to be extended later -- which unfortunately never happened.

After his death in January, we decided (with his family's blessing) that it would be a good idea to publish this work so people could read his ideas about programming the Web, his ambivalence about different aspects of Semantic Web technology, his thoughts on Openness, and more.

As a tribute to Aaron, we have posted his work on our site as a free PDF download. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA-NC) license. The work stands as originally written, with only a few typographical errors corrected to improve readability.

-- James Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Editor, Synthesis Lectures on The Semantic Web: Theory and Technology and Michael B. Morgan, President & CEO, Morgan & Claypool Publishers