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.

What does tagging contribute to the web evolution? | An introduction of web thread

(Revised October 15, 2007)

Tagging becomes popular with the prevalence of Web 2.0. A tag is a keyword or term bound to a piece of information. By default, a tag is assumed to be a correct partial explanation of the bound object. This explanation is unnecessary to be complete, and it is also unnecessary to be about the key characters of the bound object. The purpose of tagging is primarily to associate web content to human conventions.

From the view of web evolution, however, we have another explanation of this Web-2.0 tagging. By this view, tagging is a process of drawing threads across the Web. The activities of tagging convert the traditional node-driven web to be a new thread-driven web; this is a prediction based on web evolution.

Node-driven Web versus Thread-driven Web

A node-driven web is a web whose structure is primarily driven by how web users link their authored web nodes to each other. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi had made great contributions on this field by studying the so-called scale-free network, which is typically node driven. Whenever a new node is added into a node-driven web, its owner decides how to connect this new node to existing ones. This type of decisions is, however, often not random. In contrast, people always tend to link a new node to the most popular node existed in the current web. The chance that a less popular node gets a new link decreases exponentially to its popularity. This theory is fundamental to the growth of node-driven webs.


Web thread is a new term. In my mind, a web thread is a connection that link various multiple web nodes to a fixed inbound. Unlike a standard web link that connects exactly one outbound node to one inbound node, a web thread may simultaneously connect more than two web nodes omnidirectionally. For example, a Web-2.0 tag is a web thread. Other than linking from one node to another, a Web-2.0 tag simultaneously connects arbitrary numbers of web nodes that share the same tag. This is why we call it a "thread" but not a "link" on the Web.

A thread-driven web is a web whose structure is primarily driven by the interconnections of web threads. When a new node is added into a thread-driven web, the web itself automatically decides how to locate this new node by assigning proper threads to it based on the content in this node. Although we do not prohibit user-specified links or threads, the popularity of a web node is determined by the richness of its content (i.e. how many threads are weaved through this node) instead of the number of human-specified links connected to this node.

The popularity of web nodes in a node-driven web is primarily decided by the votes of humans. The most popular hubs in a node-driven web may not necessarily contain rich information themselves. For example, the homepage of Google is just a simple interface without much information. But humans subjectively decide that these hubs are more valuable than many other web nodes.

In contrast, the popularity of web nodes in a thread-driven web is primarily decided by the richness of content in these nodes. The most popular hubs in a thread-driven web may not necessarily be favorite sites for most of the human users. But these nodes definitely contain richest information on the Web for machines to process.

With this comparison, we can see that a node-driven web is human-oriented while a thread-driven web is machine-oriented. If the future is Semantic Web, the Web certainly is evolving from a node-driven web to a thread-driven web. To machines, the popular human favorite sites such as the main page of Google is less valuable because it does not really provide much useful information. In contrast, machines look for nodes weaved by the most number of threads that concentrate on their searched topic. This switch of vision on World Wide Web may eventually change the methods of web search in the future.

Some Potential Impacts to the Future

This re-interpretation of tagging may bring us several positive impacts on developing next-generation web technologies.

(1) This re-interpretation brings us a new picture of World Wide Web. World Wide Web has gradually turning from a random network to be a more and more well-organized network. Before Web 2.0, the model of World Wide Web is widely known as a scale-free network formally introduced by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. This new interpretation, however, states that underneath the scale-free architecture, World Wide Web actually maintains a fairly organized latent structure, whose backbones are web threads. A scale-free network is significantly dominated by few highly connected hubs. A well-organized thread-driven network, however, is dominated by highly adopted threads. This crucial difference between the two network architecture is a key of developing next-generation web technologies, especially the next-generation web search techniques.

(2) This re-interpretation brings us a new understanding of what web tags are. Web tags are not standard web links. When we produce a new web tag, we are producing a new thread of World Wide Web. The popularity of these threads, however, are determined by their acceptance among web users. On the other hand, the popularity of web thread may still follow the Yule-Simon distribution---a power law relationship, as what the scale-free model follows. These thoughts might be helpful for the further study of web tags and threads.

(3) This re-interpretation suggests us a new way of building a semantic web. Instead of creating semantic-web nodes (as we are creating normal web nodes), building a semantic web is creating web threads and throwing these threads across a network. By weaving these threads, we acquire semantic-web nodes by their intersections.

(4) This re-interpretation brings us a new vision to personalize World Wide Web. Based on this view of thread-driven web, a personalized web becomes a web weaved by personalized threads. By delicately mapping personalized threads to widely adopted threads, we can produce personalized web for individuals. In return, these personalized webs become latent chaos patterns of the entire World Wide Web.