(130 pages)
Tim Berners-Lee1, Wendy Hall2,
James A. Hendler3, Kieron O’Hara4,
Nigel Shadbolt4 and Daniel J. Weitzner5
1 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
2 School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
3 Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
4 School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
5 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
Foundations and Trends R in
Web Science
Vol. 1, No 1 (2006) 1–130
Abstract
This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis
of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures.
A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with
a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of
the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development.
These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for
Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web
Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way
to focus its development on key communicational and representational
requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the
development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic
approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures,
are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially
embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and
governance are also reviewed.
(8 pages)
ABSTRACT
Despite the huge success of the World Wide Web as a technology,
and the significant amount of computing infrastructure on which it
sits, the Web, as an entity remains surprisingly unstudied. In this
article, we look at some of the issues that need to be explored to
model the Web as a whole, to keep it growing, and to understand
its continuing social impact. We argue that a "systems" approach,
in the sense of "systems biology" is needed if we are to be able to
understand and engineer the future of the Web.
(6 pages)
The Semantic Web is a Web of actionable
information—information derived from data through
a semantic theory for interpreting the symbols. The semantic
theory provides an account of “meaning” in which the
logical connection of terms establishes interoperability
between systems. This was not a new vision. Tim Berners-
Lee articulated it at the very first World Wide Web Conference
in 1994. This simple idea, however, remains largely
unrealized.
From Hexus
LONDON, Jan. 29, 2008 – Intel Corporation today revealed Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man widely regarded as the founder of the modern-day World Wide Web, as the most influential person in technology over the past 150 years for his impact on society and ground-breaking technology.
As Intel continues to celebrate the innovation of its 45 nanometer (nm) next-generation family of quad-core processors, it brought together a panel of experts including academics, journalists and independent third parties to vote on technology’s 45 most influential individuals.
In the judging session held last week in London, the panel’s full top ten comprised:
The two founders of Intel® – Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce both featured in the top ten,.
Moore - famous for Moore’s Law, a key factor in the rapid growth of the PC industry - was
voted 6th, while Noyce, who co-developed the integrated circuit was placed 8th.
(9 pages)
September 2005
Web and society (a conclusion)
The discussion on the Web and society was introduced by the chairman, Weitzner,
reviewing earlier discussions on public policy questions of privacy and copyright, and
arguing that we need to give people control over how they interact with information
resources, while adding transparency. Feigenbaum argued that questions of
accountability and transparency are linked: transparency enables accountability. It
was generally agreed that it was possible to write rules to cover policies and policy
violations, but that a problem was how to get people to use such rules.
Feigenbaum also noted that accountability was controversial, particularly at high
levels of abstraction. Alternative goals, such as fairness, could be pursued. Weitzner
distinguished between accountability and enforcement, and noted that the pursuit of
particular goals needed experimental and empirical work to address the question: what
happens to social interactions with particular architectures?
Berners-Lee and Milner discussed the use of process calculi to model small parts of
systems, as a potential method for helping with these social questions.
Goble noted that any kind of social regulation infrastructure would have to be
lightweight. Feigenbaum suggested that many aspects of the infrastructure, such as
identification and authentication, aren’t hard to use, although Hendler cautioned that
controlling identities is hard in distributed open systems. Weitzner noted the useful
property of the general SW architecture that allows generic high level rules covering
social interactions to be written.
Lynchpin talk by Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee’s talk highlighted different phases of information structure, moving
from characters, to linear structures, to trees and hierarchies, and lastly webs, which
can grow without a central bottleneck. The goal of a web is serendipitous reuse, but a
minus is that it comes with global obligations, such as maintaining Web content,
which are important for allowing the serendipity to happen. The SW is a web of logic,
very different from hypertext. We need the same standard for symbol space as the
WWW. We need to be able to map URIs to anything. Looking up URIs is still the
critical architecture.
Berners-Lee also offered some comments on the NLP/SW debate stemming from
Wilks’ lynchpin talk, arguing that the two are very separate.
NLP SW
Words Terms of logic
Meaning is use Meaning is defined in words, or code,
or specific use
No ownership of words URI ownership
“Hydrogen” pt:Hydrogen
Defining words in
ontology is never
complete
and a waste of time
Defining terms is never perfect but
useful
NL is constantly changing Ontologies are basically static
Can’t benefit from injecting logic Can’t benefit from cloudy statistics
Machine finds stuff Machine infers stuff