VirgoBrain’s Vision of the World » 2007

Jan

21st

The Web X.0 Ecological System

Files under Semantic Web, WWW | Leave a Comment | 21 Sunday January 2007

It has been a while since I posted an article in my Web blog, due to the fact I did not want to contaminate the specialized Web blog with superficial and non-trascendental content. Nevertheless I will incude some of my thoughts during my staying at the hospital taking care of my mother.

I have been staying about 14/15 hours per day taking care of my mother who is a kind of special demanding patient. Meanwhile “killing” the idle hours spent in the hospital I thought it will be interesting to share my thoughts. I grabbed my laptop and start talking about the complexity involved in the maintenance and set up of duties in a typical more or less important provincial hospital.

At night my hours were not disturbed much but only by my beloved patient, my mother and routine tasks performed by auxiliary night shift nurses. But in the morning the ecological system takes part in its climax. A majority of personnel are auxiliary nurses and cleaning personnel, then nurses and very few doctors. It is a typical hierarchical ecological society.

The early morning starts with personnel checking body temperture, blood pressure, then breathing aids and so on. Then the catering personnel brings the welcomed breakfast. Then later the humble and very important cleaning personnel proceeds to clean the room and clean the non-mobile patients. Later the top layer of the hierarchy, the doctors will check the current progress of patients by examing vital signs and data available from patients.

So what has to do this with regard to the WWW? Obviously there are major differences in that the WWW will be populated by automated software artifacts and that the hospital (by now) is populated by organic creatures. But we are able to determine analogies from a consumer/producer perspective in the ecology where consumers/producers are organic creatures (human beings) and automated software/hardware artifacts.

In the WWW arena, who will be the consumers? Human beings and automated software process such as B2B processes and software agents. And producers? Information created and pushed into the WWW ecological system by billions of users and systems and automated processes that harvest, gather, retrieve, index and re-organize into compact repositories such as search engine databases, subject directories and so on.

By now this is a very simple ecological system formed mainly by producers/consumers. When it will compare to a complex and dynamic system such as a provincial hospital? Well we may forecast that both successive web X.0 generations and the Semantic Web will provide a minimal infrastructure capable of generating complex dynamic systems such as the aforementioned hospital scenario.

Both of these require the population of very specialized software components such as automated Web services, workflow engines, service match-makers, dynamic on-the-fly and static versatile repositories, event-oriented rule-based/trigger-based active distributed components, optimized push and pull replicated components, intelligent information aggregators and summarizers, ontologies and automated ontology constructors and so on.

All these components should be configured to cope with uncertainty, to provide partial decidability and incomplete information, to provide probablistic hypothesis or ranking of decisions. This future web X.0 will require of many Web efforts such as the RDF/OWL-based Semantic Web, the Fuzzy/Data mining intelligent web, web 2.0, the push and pull dynamic Web, the rule-based Web, the Web Services Web, the post-relational XML-based Web and so on.