This was supposed to be a clear out, tidying up loose ends from my forty years in research and development, a Swedish death clean, emptying out those odds and ends that fill up the shed at the back of my mind. Planned in a page-by-page contents list – twelve chapter, 85,000 words, a few diagrams – it would be a simple task of putting down words one page at a time. And then the words hit the page.

Slowly, chapter by chapter, page by page, a series of paradigm shifts became evident. What had been an untidy pile of loosely connected ideas took on a new form of its own, jolted into life, and took over the narrative (incidently, while writing this, I visited Mary Shelley’s grave). The result, while perhaps not a Modern Prometheus, is a significant new theory what should lead to a substantial improvement in the practice of information sharing. Were I an active academic, I would spend another three years developing a second, more complete and coherent version. However, I have been retired for seven years, and my time is taken by growing trees and fruit. I do not plan to rewrite this book, but instead I leave it to display how a jumble of knowledge slowly coalesced into a tool for practical reasoning.

The ideas in the shed are thanks to the Studium of Blackfriars, Oxford, particularly to Fergus Kerr (Wittgenstein), Herbert McCabe (my novice master and lecturer in St Thomas), and the poor Czech professor who suffered my essays on the ancient Greeks. Also Professor Alan Middleditch (constructive solid geometry), who let me play with formal methods, and my managers at BAE Systems, who didn’t really understand what I was doing, but let me get on with it. Also to Professors Ian Horrocks and Boris Motik of Oxford University and Naeim Dathi, a colleague at Sowerby Research Centre, for helping me play on the edges of AI. And a whole raft of other collaborators and dislaborators too numerous to mention. I must also thank Monica Noriega of SAE for letting me practice writing short books – and you should thank her for the million words that I left out.