Core Interest

Interest is something with the power of attracting or holding one's attention. When one claims a thing being his core interest, however, he scarifies everything else to protect his holding of the thing of interest.

Dai Pingguo (Chinese: 戴秉国), a State Councilor of China, talked about the core interests of China in the recent US-China Strategic Economic Dialogue. He stressed that China’s core interests were "safeguarding its basic systems and national security, maintaining its sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as ensuring its sustained economic and social development." I will not comment on this statement. But let's think of what Hillary Clinton might have said if she had had to address the same question. What would have happen if she had said that the core interests of United States being security, territorial integrity, and economic growth?

Core interest is different from the most urgent issue to be solved.

Now let's think of another question. Were World Wide Web a nation, what would be its core interests? In the other words, what are the decisive reasons that drive the Web evolution?

I have a very short list in the following, and you may comment on your own opinions.

(1) A healthy environment of growing up that any new Web node may be popular by a definite period of time and by a definite amount of effort.

This is essential to the evolution of the Web. If the Web is solely a place where the rich gets richer, it can hardly evolve. There must be ways of balancing. It is not only because people want to be social that social networking becomes such a critical technology in the Web. The Web itself demands the technology for its evolution. The technology of social networking allows any newly produced Web resource (distinctive to the humans who produce the Web resource) to grow up being popular in definite period of time. It thus fosters the healthy growth of the Web.

The same philosophy is beneath the other key technologies in the current Web such as Web search and Web syndication. In the other words, the Web always demand the invention of new technologies that helps the growing popular of newly produced Web resources. Or we may interpret it in another way. If a company wants to abuse the technologies to formulate a pure rich gets richer pattern in the Web, it will fail in definite time of period as well.

(2) A fair environment of competition that the unpopular resources have chances of being popped up without the prerequisite of having been popular.

Believe it or not, unpopular represents creativity and innovation. The Web needs to foster the technologies that allow people to access the unpopular resources that may be kept unpopular forever.

This is a crucial topic especially to the society of Semantic Web or the community of linked data. A well linked web of data does not means the every piece of data in it is weighted evenly or can be accessed equally. When we request a semantics, some time we expect to get the most popular resources of the semantics and some other times we do not. More importantly, don't we need to add a layer of the innovative potential over all the linked resources so that it may facilitate the access to the innovative but unpopular mind?