Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 20:1, 5–9, 2003 c 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands.
The Wisdom Web: New Challenges for Web Intelligence (WI) JIMING LIU Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong NING ZHONG Department of Information Engineering, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan
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YIYU YAO Department of Computer Science, University of Regina, Canada ZBIGNIEW W. RAS∗ Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA
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Where are we now?
The World Wide Web (WWW) has profoundly changed our ways of doing things, from business and communication to entertainment and learning. This impact is inevitable due to the facts that the Web connectivity rapidly increases and that the on-line information astronomically explodes. In order to not only live with such a change but also benefit from the information infrastructure that WWW has empowered, we have witnessed the fast development as well as application of various WWW technologies, which cover: 1. 2. 3. 4.
network-level communication and security protocols, interface-level multimedia presentation standards, application-level mobile computing and interoperating utilities, and knowledge-level information filtering and management tools.
One notable example of the above development is Semantic Web, which is aimed at exploring the semantic knowledge dimension of the Web information storage and retrieval. In spite of its current technological advances, it is still rather unclear to many what will be the next paradigm shift in WWW. Will that be Semantic Web? Or, will there be some other forces? The field of Web Intelligence (WI), since its conception in 2000 (Zhong et al., 2000; Yao et al., 2001), has become the center place for exploring and developing answers to such questions. In what follows, we attempt to highlight some perspectives on the next paradigm shift in WWW and at the same time point out some new research directions as well as challenges for WI. ∗ To
whom all correspondence should be addressed.
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What will be the next paradigm shift?
In the movie Star Wars: Episode II, there is an interesting scene: When Obi Wan Kenobi failed to locate any relevant information about a mysterious planet (where later he discovered the clone manufacturing ground), he turned to his friend for advice. His friend, apparently knows more than the Jedi’s academy knowledge banks combine, has the following in reply: Other people seek knowledge but you my friend know wisdom. The reply in the above scene also provides an answer to our earlier question. The next paradigm shift in WWW will lie in the keyword of wisdom. The new generation of WWW will enable users to gain new wisdom of living, working, playing, and learning, in addition to information search and knowledge queries. Here, the word of wisdom, according to the Webster Dictionary (p. 1658) (Porter, 1913), can have the following meanings: 1. The quality of being wise; knowledge, and the capacity to make due use of it; knowledge of the best ends and the best means; discernment and judgment; discretion; sagacity; skill; dexterity. 2. The results of wise judgments; scientific or practical truth; acquired knowledge; erudition. In the context of WWW, the manifestation of wisdom can best be illustrated by using a minimalist Wisdom Web example. 3.
A minimalist Wisdom Web scenario
Imagine that you are traveling in the city of Montreal and trying to find a nice place to spend your evening. You may check in a Cyber Cafe and then log on to the Wisdom Web as a user “Spiderman”. Now you are thinking what is the best way to find out—this seems rather difficult especially since you are not so sure about what is really attractive out there. So, what you decide to do is to input: ‘‘What is the best night life in Montreal during this season of the year?’’
The Wisdom Web searches for about a second or two and comes with the following response: ‘‘The hockey games are on during this season of the year. Would you like to go?’’
You input: ‘‘ Yes.’’ ‘‘ There are still some tickets left and you may purchase some at the Montreal Forum. To get there, you need to take Metro and get off at the Atwater station.’’
Having get this information, you decide that this could be an interesting evening, which was also recommended by your friend before your trip. As soon as you get there, you find
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out that it is true that there are some tickets left, but they are all for the day after tomorrow, by then you will be back to work in the Bay Area in California. On the next day, you go back to the same Cyber Cafe and once again log in as “Spiderman”. The Wisdom Web still remembers your conversations yesterday. And, after you log in, it prompts you with a message: ‘‘ Hi Spiderman, you were in such a hurry yesterday that I didn’t have a chance to tell you that the tickets available are only for tomorrow and they are quite expensive too.’’
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Fundamental capabilities of the Wisdom Web
A number of fundamental capabilities are incorporated in order to carry out the above conversations: 1. The Autonomic Web support: The Wisdom Web functions essentially as an Autonomic Web. That is, the Web automatically regulates the functions and cooperation of related Websites and application services available. In order to make the Web autonomic, there are several real challenges: (A) Reflex of servers: A Wisdom Web server must be able to automatically self-nominate to other services its functional roles as well as corresponding spatial or temporal constraints and operational settings. (B) Specialization: A Wisdom Web server has to be an agent by itself that is specialized in performing some roles in a certain service. The association of its roles with any service will be measured and updated dynamically, for instance, the association may be forgotten if it is not used for some time. (C) Growth: The population of the Wisdom Web agents will dynamically change, as new agents are self-reproduced by their parent agents in order to become more specialized or aged agents are deactivated. (D) Autocatalysis: As various roles of the Wisdom Web agents are created through specialization and activated by the Wisdom Search requests, their associations with some services and among themselves must be autocatalytically aggregated. In this respect, the autocatalysis of associations is similar to the pheromone laying for positive feedback in an ant colony. (E) Problem Solver Markup Language (PSML): PSML is necessary for the Wisdom Web agents to specify their roles and settings as well as relationships with any other services. 2. Semantics: The Wisdom Web needs to understand what are meant by “Montreal”, “season”, “year”, and “night life”, and what is the right judgment of “best”, by understanding the granularities of their corresponding subjects and the whereabouts of their ontology definitions. 3. Meta-knowledge: Besides semantic knowledge extracted and manipulated in the Wisdom Search, it is also essential for the Wisdom Web agents to incorporate a dynamically created
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source of meta-knowledge that deals with the relationships between concepts and the spatial or temporal constraint knowledge in planning and executing services. It allows the agents to self-resolve their conflict of interests. 4. Planning: In the above example, the goal is to find a function or an event that may sound attractive to a visitor. The constraint is that they must be happening during this season. There are involved two associated sub-goals: In order to have an access to the recommended function or event, one needs a ticket. Further, in order to go to get the ticket, one can travel by Metro. In the Wisdom Web, ontology alone will not be sufficient. 5. Personalization: The Wisdom Web remembers the recent encounters and relates different episodes together, according to (1) “Spiderman”, (2) time, and (3) attainability of (sub-)goals. It may further identify other goals as well as course of actions for this user as their conversation goes on. 6. A sense of humor: Although the Wisdom Web does not explicitly tell a funny story, it adds some punch lines to the situation or anxiety that “Spiderman” is presently in when he logs on for the second time, which will make “Spiderman” feel absurd. 5.
The new WI era
The field of WI has entered a new era, in which we can envision that new theories, standards, tools, systems, and applications will start to emerge. We believe that WI will pave the way toward the next biggest technological invention of this century, the Wisdom Web, whose significance and impact will be equivalent to, or even far beyond, those of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876. 6.
About this special issue
This special issue in WI is devoted to some of the surrounding topics that can have impacts on the development of the ultimate Wisdom Web. Specifically, Yang, Huang, and Ng’s work attempts to resolve the issue of Web latency by offering a prediction-based Web prefetching technique. The experimental validation of the proposed data cube model shows better performance than those based on caching alone. Tsui, Liu, and Kaiser’s paper presents an autonomy-oriented computing paradigm for developing future optimal proxy servers. The key contribution of their work is on the idea of self-organized load balancing among multi-agent proxy servers, which was regarded earlier in this paper as one of the essential features of the Autonomic Web. The above work is followed by Matsuo, Ohsawa, and Ishizuka’s paper on the motivation and use of a new WWW distance measure, called average-clicks. Their intent is to make the measure better reflect human intuition of distance. The next two papers focus on the extensions of the presently used XML technologies. The paper by Wuwongse, Akama, Anutariya, and Nantajeewarawat presents a declarative description model for XML databases that provides a more direct and succinct insight into the computation of and reasoning with the databases. On the other hand, Jeong and Hsu’s paper is concerned with the integration of different XML DTDs (Document Type Description).
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Acknowledgments We would like to thank all the contributing authors for submitting (as well as revising) their manuscripts to this special issues. References Porter, N. (Ed.). (1913). Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G & C. Merriam Co. Also available at http://humanities.uchicago.edu/forms unrest/webster.form.html Yao, Y., Zhong, N., Liu, J., and Ohsuga, S. (2001). Web Intelligence (WI): Research Challenges and Trends in the New Information Age. In N. Zhong, Y.Y. Yao, J. Liu, and S. Ohsuga (Eds.), Web Intelligence: Research and Development, LNAI, Vol. 2198 (pp. 1–17). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Also available at http://link. springer.de/link/service/series/0558/bibs/2198/21980001.htm Zhong, N., Liu, J., Yao, Y.Y., and Ohsuga, S. (2000). Web Intelligence (WI). In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Computer Society International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2000), (pp. 469– 470). Silver Spring, MD: IEEE CS Press.
