Web Evolution

Many people agree on Web evolution, but few take it seriously. As a term, "web evolution" is commonly used. But few people really have thoughtfully considered the principles of Web evolution, i.e. why and how the Web evolves. Even after the initiative of Web Science, web evolution, supposed to be a significant branch of Web Science, is still lack of mentioning. For example, Wikipedia, the most popular online encyclopedia, does not have an entry of Web evolution till today (December 24th, 2007); and we don't know when this term will be added in the future.

A Brief History

One of the early attempts of formalizing the concept of web evolution was done by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of World Wide Web. In 1998, he explained the importance of evolvability on web technology. In short, we must preserve spaces for web technologies so that they can be upgraded to compromise new requests. According to Tim, "evolvability" is one of the two fundamental goals of all W3C technologies (the other goal is "Interoperability"). In particular, Berners-Lee emphasized that the key evolutionary issues at the meantime should be language evolution and data evolution. Within the context of his discussion, the term "evolvable" was actually closer to "extensible" than "evolutionary".

A more recent discussion about web evolution was at the panel "Meaning on the Web: Evolution or Intelligent Design?" at Edinburgh, Unite Kingdom during the WWW-2006 conference. This panel invited five well-known web researchers, Ron Brachman, Dan Connolly, Rohit Khare, Frank Smadja, and Frank van Harmelen. In the description of this panel, it was written as follows.

"should meaning on the Web be evolutionary, driven organically through the bottom-up human assignment of tags? Or does it need to be carefully crafted and managed by a higher authority, using structured representations with defined semantics?"

The evolution of meaning specifications on the Web is a central issue of web evolution; and this issue is especially critical to the vision of Semantic Web. But this panel still did not touch the core of web evolution, i.e. what the essential driving force of web evolution is and how this force really drives the Web forward.

Formal Study of Web Evolution

To the best of my knowledge, the article "Evolution of World Wide Web, a historical view and analogical study" is the first attempt to explain the essence of web evolution based on a theoretical thinking. The first draft of Part 1 was posted at January 12, 2007, and the first draft of Part 2 was posted at April 27, 2007. The Part 3 is still under writing. The Part 1 describes an analogical comparison between the growth of World Wide Web and the growth of humans. The Part 2 makes an abstraction of the story in Part 1 and concludes a view of web evolution by two postulates and seven corollaries. Moreover, in Part 2 we have also applied the new web-evolution theory to predict the key technologies of the next-generation Web. Although we have revised the first two parts several times, they still contain many errors that we do not have enough energy to fix them all. We plan to make a substantial revision of the article later. At the same time, however, I have written a series on this view of web evolution in ten installments here at Thinking Space (the whole list of the post is attached at the end of this post).

Based on this new view, Web evolution obeys the general law of Transformation of Quantity into Quality as all the other evolutionary processes in our world have obeyed. The unstopping accumulation of web resources quantitatively measures the progress of web evolution. Based on the general law of Transformation of Quantity into Quality, a qualitative stage transition is the inevitable consequence when any quantitative accumulation is beyond certain limit. On the Web, when the quantity of web resources reaches a certain level that the amount of these resources becomes too many to be efficiently operated by the web resource operating mechanisms at the meantime, new web resource operating mechanisms must be formed to handle this quantitative accumulation. Therefore, a stage transition (such as from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0) occurs. At the end of a stage transition, the new web resource operating mechanisms are formulated along with the prevalence of newer-quality web resources. Then a new round of quantitative accumulation starts until the next stage transition.

Although the general law of Transformation of Quantity into Quality explains why and how the Web evolves, it does not explain the reasons behind the quantitative accumulation on the Web. We believe that human contribution is the main reason for the quantitative accumulation. An essential question, thus, is why humans are willing to contribute to the Web consistently.

We argue that the motivation of human contribution is primarily due to a nature of human being, i.e. the desire of being recognized when alive and being remembered after death. The invention of World Wide Web gives ordinary people a cheap and simple way of keeping their consciousness in history. This fulfillment is so satisfactory for human desire that it is beyond the desires of money or entertainment. This fulfillment is the fundamental momentum that keeps the growing of the volume on the Web.

This view of web evolution is not flawless. Many arguments might be debatable and amendable. But the primary purpose of this work is to bring the world a fresh new vision of what World Wide Web is and how it evolves. I wish the study might eventually lead more attention to this fascinating research area. The study of Web evolution might not only affect the Web, but also bring significant impact to our humans who live in this new Web age.

A View of Web Evolution

1. In the Beginning …
2. Three Evolutionary Elements
3. Two Postulates
4. Web Evolution and Human Growth
5. Evolutionary Stage
6. Qualities of Evolutionary Stages
7. Trigger of Transition
8. Beginning of a Stage Transition
9. Essence of Web Evolution
10. Completion of a Stage Transition