Challenges and opportunities for more meaningful and sustainable Internet systems

Abstract

Despite its technological success story, the Internet is facing a rampant growth of isolated ontologies and a massive dump of unstructured legacy data. Therefore, architecting the next generation of the Internet will require a paradigm shift that goes beyond technological excellence. This is the main hypothesis we take and defend in this paper. Main drivers behind the dynamics of this future Web 3.0 are the massive and meaningful reconciliation of disparate data sources and service discovery, and the pervasiveness of these processes in daily life and work of on-line communities. Paving our way to more meaningful and sustainable internet systems, we devise a three-dimensional problem space from which we draw challenges and methodological opportunities. Next, based on this, we propose a DNS of Information. Finally, we substantiate our proposal with related research projects, practices, and initiatives that act as main catalysts or adopters. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.