Revolutionary System Models,The Net, & The Public Interest

The Interspace Prototype (1997-2000)

Digital Libraries Initiative (1994-1998)

Worm Community System (1990-1993)

Telesophy System (1984-1989)

www.canis.uiuc.edu

Revolutionary System Models,The Net, & The Public Interest

Bruce SchatzDigital Library Research Program and

NCSA

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

schatz@uiuc.edu, http://canis.uiuc.edu

NRC CSTB Workshop on Advancing the Public Interest

through Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence

National Academy of Sciences, September 25, 1997

Revolutionary System Models

• Where do new Systems come from?– Systems projects can Build Models– Models can inspire Mass Infrastructure

• Sponsor determines Purpose of Systems– Public Interest is not Commercial– Revolutionary Systems is not Commercial

• NSF technology + Foundation sponsorship

can build revolutionary system models!

1965

1975

1985

1995

2000

2010ARPANET Internet Interspace

The Third Wave of Net Evolution

PROTOCOLS IP FTP HTTP CORBA CP

SERVICES Distributed Files

GlobalHypermedia

DistributedObjects

GlobalSemantics

FUNCTION Access Organization Analysis

UNITS Packets Files Links Objects Concepts

DistributedPaths

Categories

SMP

Evolution of the Net

• The Present: Access– The Net fetches documents

• The Future: Organization– The Net searches repositories

• The Millennium: Analysis– The Net correlates information

From the Internet (data transmission)

to the Interspace (information manipulation)

System Model Timeline

• 1984 Telesophy proposed at Bellcore– revolutionary system prototype developed

• 1989 Schatz systems advisor at NCSA– 20th Anniversary ARPANET Symposium

• 1994 NCSA Mosaic gains many users– Mosaic 1M, Netscape 50M, Explorer 100M

• 1999 Web achieves Telesophy functionality– browsing & sharing multimedia documents

Advancing the Public Interest

• Industrial R&D labs have Vanished

• Commercial pressures push Advertising

• Where are Revolutionary Models today?

• At Universities, with public & private funds

For example...

Global Cultural Memory

• Enable Everyone to understand – How They Have Lived and

– How They Will Live

• The Structures of Everyday Life– recorded over space and time

– correlated in a global information space

• Appreciate the Past and Predict the Future

Evolutionary System Model

• Getty project using commercial technology

• Museum-style Web collection

• curators to classify from big sources

• Champaign County Historical information

• county-level community repository

• 5000 Historical Societies in US

Revolutionary System Model

• A planet for every kid’s local environment

• Federating the planets into a universe

• Ordering all planets from kid’s POV

• Flying through the Kids Universe

• Finding similar kids from different POVs

• Connecting historically through museums

• this is feasible due to NSF technology!!

Research Issues in KDI

• Community Repositories [sovereign individual]

– indexing all the knowledge of small groups

• Semantic Federation [transient centralization]

– creating virtual libraries from distributed repositories

• Information Analysis [think globally, act locally]

– correlating across repositories to solve problems

The World of a Billion Repositories:

The Interspace of the 21st Centuryhttp://www.canis.uiuc.edu/keytalks.html

Community System

browse and share all the knowledge of a community

data results(database management) (electronic mail)

literature news(information retrieval) (bulletin boards)

knowledge(hypertext annotations)

Formal Informal

Worm Community System

• WCS Information:

Literature Biosis, Medline, newsletter, meetings

Data Genes, Maps, Sequences, strains, people

• WCS Functionality

Browsing search, navigation

Filtering selection, analysis

Sharing linking, publishing

WCS: 250 users at 50 labs across the Internet

Federation Techniques

• Structure Federation using SGML

• Syntactic Federation using multiple views

• Semantic Federation using term suggestion

• examples from DLI Testbed

http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu

Analysis Enviroments

• Concept Spaces for interactive suggestion

• Category Maps for semantic clustering

• Information Spaceflight for navigation

• examples from DLI Research

http://canis.uiuc.edu/interspace/

Interspace Prototype

• semantic retrieval concept spaces

• semantic interoperability vocabulary switching

• semantic indexing object categorization

• semantic clustering category maps

• information spaceflight region visualization

• analysis environment path correlations

KDI Implications

• Sovereign Individual – community repositories for custom indexing

• Transient Centralization– community curators as relationship bonders

• Think Globally, Act Locally– vocabulary switches for correlation infrastructure

• Situational Analysis– dynamic categorization for problem solving

• Zen of the Net– at one with the knowledge of the world (mushin)