The Web's Awake An Introduction to the Field of Web Science and the Concept of Web Life

by Tetlow, Philip D.

• ISBN13: 9780470137949
• ISBN10: 0470137940
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-05-04
• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Press

Summary

The central thesis of The Web's Awake is that the phenomenal growth and complexity of the web is beginning to outstrip our capability to control it directly. Philip Tetlow's involvement and experience with the semantic web and the World Wide Web Consortium is reflected as he offers a provocative, futurist perspective on the web's evolution towards independence. Many have worked on the concept of emergent properties within highly complex systems, concentrating heavily on the underlying mechanics concerned. Few, however, have studied the fundamentals involved from a sociotechnical perspective. In short, the virtual anatomy of the Web remains relatively uninvestigated. The Web's Awake attempts to seriously explore this gap, citing a number of provocative, yet objective, similarities from studies relating to both real world and digital systems. It presents a collage of interlinked facts, assertions, and coincidences which boldly point to a Web with powerful potential for life.

Author Biography

Philip Tetlow is a Senior Certified IT Architect in IBM's Global Business Services Division, a Chartered Engineer, and an Open Group Master IT Architect. He has more than twenty years of experience in the IT industry, specializing in the application of Web-based technologies, metadata, and transformation techniques on large central government systems. He is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium and was responsible for coordinating its task force on the application of the semantic Web in software engineering.

Table of Contents

The Web and life	p. 1
The spectrum of complexity	p. 31
The importance of discreteness and symmetry in systems	p. 61
Natural structures for man-made machines - curvature in information and computation	p. 71
Positional information and scale-free networks	p. 101
Evolution through engineering	p. 119
A less-than-simple matter of boundless organics	p. 133
Emergent intelligence and posthuman concepts	p. 149
The physics of information and computing	p. 169
Counter arguments	p. 189
Objective opinions	p. 197
An outline of the semantic Web and its potential for software engineering	p. 205
Beyond the semantic Web	p. 215
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.