Looking Back, Looking forward
The process of designing things in a very large space
http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0313-bcs-tbl/
Tim Berners-Lee
MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science
This talk
- Philosophical engineering
- The Web
- The Semantic Web
- Web Science
Philosophical Engineering
- cf. Experimental Philosophy
- Microscopic rules
- Macroscopic behavior
- Connection between them
- Synthesis vs Analysis
- Rules are social as well as technical
Designing a system...
involves social conventions too.
Microscopic system
Macroscopic effect
Analyse the result
Is this what we want?
The process of web science
Science and engineering
Magic
magic = stuff you don't understand
More magic
magic = stuff you don't understand yet
Second guessing
For example...
Email
WWW
Web essential: Universality
- Hardware device
- Operating system
- Software vendor
- Language and culture
- Disability
- Quality of information
- Type of data
Web essential: Layering
- Internet designed independent of application
- Email, FTP, Web, Voice, ...
- Web designed independent of application
- Browsing, shopping, participating, searching...
- Foundation vs. Ceiling technologies
- Open royalty-free standards
- Clean interface makes no assumptions
- Flexibility points
Building on WWW: Google
Wiki
Blogs
- Micro: Trackback
- Macro: The blogosphere
Semantic Web
SW: Everything has a URI
Don't say "colour" say
<http://example.com/2002/std6#col>
Semantic Web Technical
The element of the Semantic Web
- Can be encoded in XML
- Simplicity and mathematical consistency
- This is called Resource Description Framework (RDF)
Semantic web includes tables,...
...trees
... everything
Shapes of data
- lines: tape, cards
- matrix: databases
- Trees: SGML, XML, Top-down structured design, OO
- Net: Internet (?), WWW (?)
The shape of the web
Society includes communities on many scales
Universal WWW must include communities on many scales
Applications connected by concepts
Fractal Web of concepts
- Across boundaries of scale -- personal, group, global
- Varying access levels
- Tension between local and global standards
- Society is a fractal tangle, so must SW be.
- Personal interactions on multiple scales
The semantic web is about allowing data systems to change by evolution,
not revolution
- Communities will be of many sizes.
- There will be very many small ones (6.10^9 of size 10^0)
and a few global ones (e.g. W3C Recommendations)
- Kleinberg shows
that fractal (1/f) distribution is optimal under some
assumptions
- Swoogle
results for example (right)
- We have less experience when fractal is not constrained
to a 2D surface.
Total Cost of Ontologies (TCO)
Assume :-) ontologies
evenly spread across orders of magnitude; committee size
as log(community), time as committee^2, cost shared across
community.
Scale |
Eg |
Committee size |
Cost per ontology (weeks) |
My share of cost |
0 |
Me |
1 |
1 |
1 |
10 |
My team |
4 |
16 |
1.6 |
100 |
Group |
7 |
49 |
0.49 |
1000 |
|
10 |
100 |
0.10 |
10k |
Enterprise |
13 |
169 |
0.017 |
100k |
Business area |
16 |
256 |
0.0026 |
1M |
|
19 |
361 |
0.00036 |
10M |
|
22 |
484 |
0.000048 |
100M |
National, State |
25 |
625 |
0.000006 |
1G |
EU, US |
28 |
784 |
0.000001 |
10G |
Planet |
31 |
961 |
0.000000 |
Total cost of 10 ontologies: 3.2 weeks. Serious project: 30
ontologies, TCO = 10 weeks.
Lesson:
Do your bit. Others
will do theirs.
Thank those who do working groups!
Web science - challenges
User Interface challenges
Domain-specific user interfaces are
blossoming... but what about generic ones?
- Generality: can browse any data anywhere
- Dynamically pick up from ontology: Lenses, style,
forms
- Independent control of: style, provenance, domains
(vocabulary groups)
- Blow spreadsheet tools away
Data policy challenges
- Identity
- Privacy
- Appropriate use
- Transparency
- Trust models
Resilience
- Internet breakage: Slashdotting
- Web breakage: Error 404
- Social breakage - Phishing etc
Challenge: New devices
- Great diversity
- Portable things
- Pixels everytwhere
- Developing countries
See W3C Mobile Web Initiative
Challenge: Intercreativity
- Creativity together
- Fractal groups
- New geography-free connectivity
- More intuitive interfaces
- New forms of democracy for difference cases
- Connection of half-formed ideas
Web Science: multidisciplinary
- Computer science
- Policy and Law
- Network engineering
- Economics
- Sociol Science
- Psychology
- Mathematics
- Media studies
- etc...
Web Science Research Initiative
- Getting people together
- Defining resaerch areas
- Moving & funding students
- Southampton ECS and MIT CSAIL
- webscience.org
Thank You
More:
WSRI: webscience.org
W3C w3.org
Thank you for your attention
http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0313-bcs-tbl/