Looking Back, Looking forward
The process of designing things in a very large space
http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0314-soton-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 - as envisaged
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
Blog
Semantic Web
SW: Everything has a URI
Don't say "colour" say
<http://example.com/2002/std6#col>
(
Oxford talk)
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
- 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
Web Science Challenges
- User interface to web of data
- Policy awareness
- Resilience
- New devices
- Collective creativity
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
Challenge: Resilience
- Internet breakage: Slashdotting
- Web breakage: Error 404
- Social breakage - Phishing etc.
Challenge: New devices
- Great diversity
- Portable things
- Pixels everywhere
- Developing countries
See W3C Mobile Web Initiative
Challenge: Collective Creativity
- 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
- Social Science
- Psychology
- Mathematics
- Media studies
- etc....
Web Science Research Initiative
- Getting people together
- Defining research areas
- Moving & funding students
- Southampton ECS and MIT CSAIL
- webscience.org
Thank You
More:
WSRI: webscience.org
Thank you for your attention
http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0314-soton-tbl/
