Qualities of Evolutionary Stages, A View of Web Evolution, series No. 6

(Revised May. 25, 2008)

Quality is a characteristic property that defines the apparent individual nature of something. The last corollary tells that the Web evolution stages can be measured by quality. Now we are going to resolve what the particular qualities are.

Corollary 3: the quality measurement of characteristic variables of Web evolution can be defined analogously to the quality measurement of the respective characteristic variables of human growth.

This corollary is obtained from the Corollary 1 and Corollary 2. Since every evolutionary stage of the Web can be well mapped to a particular stage of human growth, we can certainly define the measurement methods for Web evolution in an analogous way of defining the measurement methods for human growth. The two varied evolutionary procedures, however, share a mapping of their quality evaluation methodology.

Three Basic Types of Web Resources

Based on the discussion of three basic evolutionary elements of WWW, Web resources have three basic types---the descriptive type (static content, data resources), the functional type (dynamic behavior, service resources), and the interconnective type (interconnective link, link resources). The three resource types are mutually independent to each other. A data resource can exist without being used by any service and connected by any link; a service resource can exist without having any data and being connected by any link; a link resource can exist without being used to connect any other resources. Because of this fact, we need to have varied quality and quantity measurement for each of the individual type of Web resources.

Based on the Corollary 3, we can map the three types of web resources (descriptive, functional, and interconnective) to three characteristic variables that measure the growth of human---personality, capability, and interpersonal relationship. To simplify our presentation, we substitute "interpersonal relationship" by "friendship" in the future discussion. In particular, personality of human is descriptive type and hence it maps to data resource on the web; capability of human is functional type and hence it maps to service resource on the web; and friendship of human is interconnective type and hence it maps to link resource on the web. We will justify these mappings in more details shortly later. By these mappings, we can analogically define the quality and quantity measurements of Web evolution on the basis of the quality and quantity measurements of human growth.

Two Fundamental Views about Quality Measurements

There are two fundamental views when measuring human growth---the individual point of view and the community point of view. By the individual point of view, a person grows up by improving the qualities of personality, capability, and friendship himself. By the community point of view, however, a person's growth is about the person's incrementally taking (and producing) varied resources from (and for) a community. Within a particular stage of one's growth, a person takes (and produces) certain quality of resources from (and for) community by quantity. Within a transitional period of one's growth (i.e. one grows up from a lower stage to an upper stage, e.g., growing up from newborn to pre-school), however, the person suddenly gains the ability to take (and produce) resources of a higher quality from (and for) community. By the Corollary 1, Web evolution can be measured in the same way.

Quality and Quantity Measurements of Human Growth

Measurements of Personality

From the individual point of view, personality is the complex of all the attributes that characterizes a unique individual. For example, a person's personality is a complex of his emotion, knowledge, customs, etc.

From the community point of view, however, every personal attribute is a descriptive resource that belongs to a community. For example, my emotion and knowledge are resources of the community I participate. They are the resources that are consumable by the other community members (certainly, however, including myself). By this community view, there is a clear mapping between human personality and Web data resource.

By the community point of view, the personality of a person is a unique, personalized subset of descriptive community resources. In terms of humans' growth, this definition describes a measurement of quantity and quality about personality.

The quantity of a personality is measured by the amount of descriptive community resources the personality possesses. For example, from the individual point of view John learns more knowledge. This is, however, equivalent to say that John possesses greater quantity of shared knowledge resources from a community. From the individual point of view Peter thinks of a new theory. This is equivalent to say that Peter has produced a new knowledge resource for community. Moreover, Peter automatically possesses the new resource by having produced it himself.

The quality of a personality is measured by the highest quality of one's possessed descriptive resources. The quality of a descriptive resource is then measured by the degree of productiveness the resource supports when it is used. More productive descriptive resources are with higher quality. For example, between patience and impatience the former one is a higher quality personality resource and the latter one is a lower quality personality resource. Impatience is generally less helpful for producing more valuable community resources. On the contrary, patience is a high quality resource that is preferred by community for more resource production. In similar, impatience is a personality resource we have with us when we were born. But patience is a personality resource we obtain when we grow up.

Measurements of Capability

From the individual point of view, capability is the ability to execute a specified course of action. For example, Alice can knit; knitting is a capability of Alice.

From the community point of view, every personal ability is a functional resource of a community. A functional resource is a resource that may consume the other community resources and produce. For example, Alice owns the functional resource of knitting, which consumes community resources such as Alice's labor and patience, and eventually produces product such as sweater. By this community view, there is a clear mapping between human capability and Web service resource.

By the community view, the capability of a person is a unique, personalized subset of functional community resources. In terms of humans' growth, this definition presents a measurement of quantity and quality about capability.

The quantity of a capability is measured by the amount of functional community resources the capability possesses. For example, from the individual point of view Alice learns more capabilities. This is equivalent to say that Alice possesses greater quantity of functional resources from a community.

The quality of a capability is measured by the highest quality of its possessed functional resources. The quality of a functional resource is then measured by how much initiative the functional resource is when consuming community resources (of any type). The functional resources with greater initiative have higher quality. For example, Alice can clean room by being asked to do it. This passive house-cleaning capability is with low quality. By contrast, Mary actively clean room without being asked. This active house-cleaning capability is with high quality. Again, we see that the active capabilities are not born-with but requiring people to grow up to certain age to obtain.

Measurements of Friendship

From the individual point of view, friendship is the connections of a person to the other persons in a society.

From the community point of view, every connection among persons is an interpersonal resource. Hence we also see a clear mapping between human friendship and Web link resources.

By the community view, the friendship of a person is a unique, personalized subset of interpersonal community resources. In terms of humans' growth, this definition presents a measurement of quantity and quality about friendships.

The quantity of a friendship is measured by the number of interpersonal community resources the friendship possesses. For example, from the individual point of view Peter makes more friends. This is equivalent to say that Peter possesses more interpersonal resources from community.

The quality of a friendship is measured by the highest quality of its possessed interpersonal community resources. The quality of a interpersonal resource is measured by how vulnerable its connection is. The less vulnerable connections have higher quality. For example, the friendships between pre-school kids are generally with less quality than the friendships between college students. The friendships between pre-school kids are built upon loose foundation, such as they are living in the same neighborhood and have attended the same school. But the friendships between college students are built upon much stronger foundation such as common interest and beliefs (e.g., the common interest of classic music and the common belief of pursuing democracy). In comparison, the friendships of the former type are more vulnerable to the change of external environment than the ones of the latter type.

Quality Measurements of Web Evolution

By carefully define the quality measurements of human growth, by the Corollary 3 we can analogically define the quality measurements of Web evolution.

(1) The quality of a data resource is measured by the degree of productiveness the data resource has when it is used by the public. For example, the Web-1.0-quality data resources are raw data without labels; the Web-2.0-quality data resources are human-tagged data. Hence Web-2.0 data resources have higher quality than Web-1.0 data resources have because they are more useful for production.

(2) The quality of a service resource is measured by the degree of initiativity this service resource has when consuming Web resources (which could include itself). For example, the Web-1.0-quality service resources are passive (or reactive) and non-portable; the Web-2.0-quality service resources are active and portable. Hence Web-2.0 service resources have higher quality than Web-1.0 service resources have because they are more initiative to do their work.

(3) The quality of a link resource is measured by the degree of vulnerability the link resource has. For example, the Web-1.0-quality link resources are hardcoded and each of them links between only two nodes; the Web-2.0-quality link resources are labeled and each of them simultaneously connects many nodes. Hence Web-2.0 link resources have higher quality because it is much more difficult to totally delete them from the Web (they are less vulnerable).

Final Address

The Corollary 3 is actually a general methodology for studying the progress of Web evolution. A difficult of Web evolution research with respect to others such as natural evolution is that the Web is too new to have long history for us to study. This is why the analogical methodology become particularly useful and helpful. Without a fair reference, the research of Web evolution might simply be trapped into fortune-telling. However, from Corollary 1 to Corollary 3 we declared a scientific methodology that can lead the research of Web evolution into a formal track. This is a standard scientific way to study events that will happen but not happen yet.

The next: Trigger of Transition

• Previous posts in this series
  
• In the Beginning …
  
• Three Evolutionary Elements
  
• Two Postulates
  
• Web Evolution and Human Growth
  
• Evolutionary Stage
  

Some Truth about the Semantic Web

I have a new post at the Semantic Focus blog. Also I appreciate James Simmons for his help of editing my original submission. This article discusses issues on the philosophical level and probably it is more related to the new realm of Web Science. So it should be easily readable for all persons, even if they are not familiar to the idea of semantic web.

In this new post, I discussed several debatable issues about semantic web. Particularly, these are the main viewpoints in the post.

1) A semantic web must simultaneously be a proactive web, while the traditional Web is a reactive web.

2) Web 2.0 is a low-degree active web, an initial step towards the Semantic Web.

3) In a semantic web, each web node by default has a unique interpretation about the existing web. In contrast, in the traditional Web every web node by default shares a common interpretation about the existing web.

4) The motivation of seeking increased communication will help construct greater scale ontological agreements. The motivation of seeking profits of invention, however, will help construct brand new ontological agreements to replace old ones. This is a secret in modern democratic society; and this is the secret to construct a practical semantic world from bottom-up.

For more details, readers can watch the full post at here.

Believing and Understanding

Nothing is easier than believing we understand experiences we've never had.

A quote from Gwen Bristow found written on a wall in Covent Garden. It is also read from the Mind Hacks Blog.

Many of our beliefs are indeed, however, deviating from the fact. The understanding of facts is often twisted because of the belief that we understand what we really don't understand. This is why a semantic world is so complicated. When a world contains not only the facts but also the understanding (or interpretations) of the facts, this world becomes a semantic world.

A semantic world is both complex and exciting. On the negative side, the existence of various interpretations of same facts makes a semantic web super complex. Therefore, it is very difficult to construct such a world from scratch. On the positive side, however, a pragmatic semantic world must endure a great level of forgiveness, i.e., we do not need to enforce any great-scale agreements in such a world. In fact, the reach of greater scale agreements in a semantic world must be established by self-willingness. This type of self-willingness can also be addressed as social communication, a significant character of Web 2.0. Isn't it a natural evolution when Web 2.0 emerges before the Semantic Web?

The Internet is Dead and Boring?

At August 24, Mark Cuban made another attending grabbing headline at his blog---"The Internet is Dead and Boring." In the post, Cuban explained a viewpoint that "every generation has its defining breakthrough." Nevertheless I agree with this viewpoint, his evidence to support this viewpoint, which is the Internet, is awkward. Cuban claimed that the Internet was at present stopping evolving. The cycle of Internet evolution has come to its end. I am, however, quite doubt of this claim.

According to Wikipedia, the Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). If Cuban's assessment is only about the very low level machine protocols, probably it is boring since many of them have been standards and unlikely to be changed in the future. But just a little bit above these every bottom-level protocols, there are many new problems occurred during the web evolution. For example, how should we design better machine protocols to share semantics over the Internet? This type of demands regularly emerges above the surface when World Wide Web, the most important product due to the invention of Internet, evolves. In fact, we can predict that the upgrade of fundamental internet technologies will not stop before the end of WWW evolution.

In the post, Cuban emphasized the limitation of bandwidth on the Internet. Nevertheless this is a serious problem, it actually is a sign that we need creative innovations on Internet instead of being a signal that the Internet is dead and boring.

The size of bandwidth is always has its physical limit, but humans' demanding of greater bandwidth never ends. This basic contradiction on the Internet is actually a driving force leading new innovations on higher-performance data transmission over the Internet. Besides paving more optical lines underground, we can also invent new protocols and new internet communication models to solve the bandwidth problem. As a metaphor, the bandwidth problem on the Internet is similar to the limit of time in our real life. As we know, we only have 24 hours a day and this bandwidth can never be increased. But does it mean that we cannot have better communication among people due to this limit? Certainly not! We can have better scheduling and communication methods so that the time usage could be optimized. For many centuries, people still have ways to invent new ideas of using time. If innovations on using real-world time never ends, why should we be pessimistic about the dead of Internet due to the limit of bandwidth?

In conclusion, the Internet might be dead and boring some day, but it is definitely not at present. The living progress of web evolution seeks for new innovations on basic internet functions. The demand of better consuming of bandwidth also requires new innovations on the Internet. The future of Internet is exciting. Let's all look forward to the new innovations of the Internet!

Evolutionary Stage, A View of Web Evolution, series No. 5

A central issue of Web evolution research is to identify the evolutionary stages. If the Web evolves in stages as we declare, we should be able to check these stages in an objective way. This is what science is all about. Based on the Postulate 1, we actually already have the answer to our question.

Corollary 2: the evolutionary stage of a macroscopic Web existence can be identified by the quality of its contained Web resources.

A Web resources is a self-contained piece of productive information on the Web. By self-contained a Web resource can be transmitted from one place to another on the Web alone without information loss. By productive a Web resource can be used to produce and manufacture. For example, a Web document is often a Web resource, and so is an independent Web service or a Web link. By contrast, a single word such as "Ding" is often not a Web resource because its meaning is generally undecidable without a local context, i.e., a single word often cannot be transmitted alone on the Web without information loss. Informally, we may say that a Web resource is a piece of intentionally produced resource on the Web that can be unambiguously reused and further manufactured.

By having understood what a Web resource is, a macroscopic Web existence is an existence on the Web that contains a non-empty set of Web resources. For instance, a macroscopic Web existence could be a Web page, a Web site, a particular subset of WWW, or even the entire World Wide Web itself.

People often unconsciously use stage-style terms to describe macroscopic Web existences. For example, this is a 1.0 page, or that is a 2.0 Web site, or there may be a semantic web. Are these statements having scientific adjustment?

Based on the Law of Transformation of Quantity into Quality (foundation of the Postulate 1), the progress of every macroscopic evolutionary element can be measured by certain quality that is checkable. By applying this fact to the practice of Web evolution, we may also be able to measure the evolutionary stage of a macroscopic Web existence by certain quality. Moreover, the quality of a macroscopic Web existence must be evaluated by the qualities of its contained Web resources since it is a collection of Web resources. Hence we have the Corollary 2.

The Corollary 2 only tells that there exist quality to measure the progress of Web evolution. But what are these qualities and how do they measure? It is up to the next corollary to answer these questions.

The next: Qualities of Evolutionary Stages

• Previous posts in this series
  
• In the Beginning …
  
• Three Evolutionary Elements
  
• Two Postulates
  
• Web Evolution and Human Growth
  

Web Evolution and Human Growth, A View of Web Evolution, series No. 4

(revised at May. 25, 2008)

At the last installment, I introduced the two postulates on why and how the Web evolves. Based on them, we can derive seven interrelated corollaries. The two postulates and seven corollaries altogether compose a coherent view of web evolution. Including this one, I use seven posts to describe this view.

Corollary 1: there exist natural mappings between the stages of web evolution and the stages on human growth.

The Postulate 1 tells that the Web must evolve by stages. Moreover, each stage of Web evolution can be identified by certain quality.

At the same time, the Postulate 2 tells that the process of Web evolution is to materialize humans' consciousness in an increasing order. We know that the level of humans' consciousness increases in a natural order when they grow up. Hence it is reasonable to map the stages of Web evolution to the stages of human growth. The results show that such a type of mapping does exist naturally. The following tables are a few of my discovery.

newborn babies vs. Web-1.0 spaces

a Newborn Baby	a Web-1.0 Space
I have parents	Webmasters
Watch me, but I won't explain	Humans understand, machines don't
Contact my parents if you want to know more about me	Contact section on page (email, phone number, fax, address, ...)
My parents decide who my friends are. Actually, I don't care	Manually specified Web links
Hug me, I smile; hit me, I cry (conditional reflex)	Reactive Web functions and services

pre-school kids vs. Web-2.0 Spaces.

a Pre-School Kid	a Web-2.0 Space
I have parents	Webmasters (blog owners)
Parents teach me knowledge (though often not well organized)	Tagging
I understand many facts but maybe imprecisely and incorrectly	Folksonomy
I can deliver and distribute messages, especially for my parents	Blogging and commenting
Whom my friends are is primarily determined by my parents' social activities	Social network
We kids can be coordinated together to do something beyond individual's capability	Web widget, mashup
I may actively make suggestion based on my communication with friends	Collective intelligence

educated children vs. Semantic-Web Space

an Educated Child	a Semantic-Web Space
I go to school and learn formal knowledge from textbooks	Ontology
I can explain messages and everybody else can understand	Semantic annotation, ontology matching
I can make suggestions based on my understanding	Reasoning and inference
Friends of mine are connected based on our common interest	Semantic grid
I can handle requests by understanding them	Semantic web services

The discovery of the mapping opens a new door towards the research of Web evolution. Continuing on this series, we will watch more evidences of this metaphor and how the metaphor helps explain the very complicated issues of Web evolution in a way that can be easily understood by unprofessional readers.

The next: Evolutionary Stage

• Previous posts in this series
  
• In the Beginning …
  
• Three Evolutionary Elements
  
• Two Postulates
  

Clone: An Interesting Topic on the Web

Clone is an interesting topic for many people. Many of us may remember Star Wars series in which clones become terrible killing machines. But here we do not discuss these physical clones in Sci-Fi movies. In contrast, we are interesting in one question: do we need clones of web sites in World Wide Web?

Yesterday, Rogelio Bernal Andreo, founder of CoRank, posted an article at Read/WriteWeb in which he somehow degraded the importance of cloning. Although his arguments are fairly well self-explained in the article, I want to address another side of his arguments, i.e., web clones are important for a flourishing WWW.

Let's look at our human society. Disregarding the born-nature of individual human beings, we are producing clones, many clones, of several functional persons repeatedly. For example, at Los Angels there is a postman named John and at New York there is another postman named Peter. Disregarding that John and Peter has different tempers and personalities, they perform the same function with regard to the entire human society. If we exchange them and let John go to New York but Peter come to Los Angels, the entire society very likely keeps the same since both of them can simply perform their original functions and nobody else might care of this exchange. Therefore, John and Peter are indeed clones to each other if this discussion is with respect to the entire human society.

Besides the existence of this type of clones, a rich and complicated network such as the human society needs these existences. A crucial difference between a rich and complicated network and a simple network is their scales. In a simple network, such as within a small village, we probably need only one postman because there is a fairly small number of members. On the contrary, we definitely need more than one postman in US because of the significant larger number of people. As the result, we clone this single postman many times by, for example, our education and training system. By cloning this typical functional person (postman), we distribute a universal function (delivering mails) so that it can be well performed locally in our society.

As a richer and richer, and more and more complicated network, World Wide Web also needs this type of clones. It is fairly hopeless to assume that the advance of the distributional computation technologies could be faster than the growth of World Wide Web. In the other words, a single Google cannot solve all web search; and a single Digg cannot dig everything. We need to start thinking of the entire web as a society that is composed by many cities and towns instead of treating the web as a single village. Therefore, we indeed need (other than bury) clones, no matter they are Digg clones or Google clones. But one thing is important to these clones---they need to understand that we need only one USPS national wide, but there must be many clones of USPS offices across the nation.