DistOS 2014W Lecture 6

Group Discussion on "The Early Web

Questions to discuss:

1. How do you think the web would have been if not like the present way?
2. What kind of infrastructure changes would you like to make?

Group 1

Relatively satisfied with the present structure of the web some changes suggested are in the below areas:

• Make use of the greater potential of Protocols
• More communication and interaction capabilities.
• Implementation changes in the present payment method systems. Example usage of "Micro-computation" - a discussion we would get back to in future classes. Also, Cryptographic currencies.
• Augmented reality.
• More towards individual privacy.

Group 2

A large portion of the web serves content that is overwhelmingly concerned about presentation rather than structuring content. Tim Berner-Lees himself bemoaned the death of the semantic web.

• Information to be classified in detail
  • Organize things on web. Ex: Yahoo indexers
  • Suggestion for the need of Universal Decimal System an idea by Paul Otlet to be considered.
  • In the end it comes to semantic web
• Information redundancy
• Information verification

Group 3

• What we want to keep
  • Linking mechanisms
  • Minimum permissions to publish
• What we don't like
  • Relying on one source for document
  • Privacy links for security
• Proposal
  • Peer-peer to distributed mechanisms for documenting
  • Reverse links with caching - distributed cache
  • More availability for user - what happens when system fails?
  • Key management to be considered - Is it good to have centralized or distributed mechanism?

Group 4

• An idea of web searching for us
• A suggestion of a different web if it would have been implemented by "AI" people
  • AI programs searching for data - A notion already being implemented by Google slowly.
• Generate report forums
• HTML equivalent is inspired by the AI communication
• Higher semantics apart from just indexing the data
  • Problem : "How to bridge the semantic gap?"
  • Search for more data patterns

Group design exercise — The web that could be

• “The web that wasn't” mentioned the moans of librarians.
• A universal classification system is needed.
• The training overhead of classifiers (e.g., librarians) is high. See the master's that a librarian would need.
• More structured content, both classification, and organization
• Current indexing by crude brute-force searching for words, etc., rather than searching metadata
• Information doesn't have the same persistence, see bitrot and Vint Cerf's talk.
• Too concerned with presentation now.
• Tim Berner-Lees bemoaning the death of the semantic web.
• The problem of information duplication when information gets redistributed across the web. However, we do want redundancy.
• Too much developed by software developers
• Too reliant on Google for web structure
  • See search-engine optimization
• Problem of authentication (of the information, not the presenter)
  • Too dependent at times on the popularity of a site, almost in a sophistic manner.
  • See Reddit
• How do you programmatically distinguish satire from fact
• The web's structure is also “shaped by inbound links but would be nice a bit more”
• Infrastructure doesn't need to change per se.
  • The distributed architecture should still stay. Centralization of control of allowed information and access is terrible power. See China and the Middle-East.
  • Information, for the most part, in itself, exists centrally (as per-page), though communities (to use a generic term) are distributed.
• Need more sophisticated natural language processing.

Class discussion

Focusing on vision, not the mechanism.

• Reverse linking
• Distributed content distribution (glorified cache)
  • Both for privacy and redunancy reasons
  • Suggested centralized content certification, but doesn't address the problem of root of trust and distributed consistency checking.
    • Distributed key management is a holy grail
    • What about detecting large-scale subversion attempts, like in China
• What is the new revenue model?
  • What was TBL's revenue model (tongue-in-cheek, none)?
  • Organisations like Google monetized the internet, and this mechanism could destroy their ability to do so.
• Search work is semi-distributed. Suggested letting the web do the work for you.
• Trying to structure content in a manner simultaneously palatable to both humans and machines.
• Using spare CPU time on servers for natural language processing (or other AI) of cached or locally available resources.
• Imagine a smushed Wolfram Alpha, Google, Wikipedia, and Watson, and then distributed over the net.
• The document was TBL's idea of the atom of content, whereas nowaday we really need something more granular.
• We want to extract higher-level semantics.
• Google may not be pure keyword search anymore. It is essentially AI now, but we still struggle with expressing what we want to Google.
• What about the adversarial aspect of content hosters, vying for attention?
• People do actively try to fool you.
• Compare to Google News, though that is very specific to that domain. Their vision is a semantic web, but they are incrementally building it.
• In a scary fashion, Google is one of the central points of failure of the web. Even scarier is less technically competent people who depend on Facebook for that.
• There is a semantic gap between how we express and query information, and how AI understands it.
• Can think of Facebook as a distributed human search infrastructure.
• A core service of an operating system is locating information. Search is infrastructure.
• The problem is not purely technical. There are political and social aspects.
  • Searching for a file on a local filesystem should have a unambiguous answer.
  • Asking the web is a different thing. “What is the best chocolate bar?”
• Is the web a network database, as understood in COMP 3005, which we consider harmful.
• For two-way links, there is the problem of restructuring data and all the dependencies.
• Privacy issues when tracing paths across the web.
• What about the problem of information revocation?
• Need more augmented reality and distributed and micro payment systems.
• We need distributed, mutually untrusting social networks.
  • Now we have the problem of storage and computation, but also take away some of of the monetizationable aspect.
• Distribution is not free. It is very expensive in very funny ways.
• The dream of harvesting all the computational power of the internet is not new.
  • Startups have come and gone many times over that problem.
• Google's indexers understands quite well many documents on the web. However, it only presents a primitive keyword-like interface. It doesn't expose the ontology.
• Organising information does not necessarily mean applying an ontology to it.
• The organisational methods we now use don't use ontologies, but rather are supplemented by them.