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Background

- Some Notes on the Origin of the Dynamic Web Concept

  • The distinctive, and I believe original, character of the dynamic web stems from its combination of two key ideas.
    • That information intended for sharing with unspecified users must be broken down into assertions that can be regarded as "indivisible and immutable versions which are semantically complete and have their own provenance".
    • That a global ontology can grow organically from a single class of everything to describe all knowledge provided that this class and all its sub-classes may be specialized in any number of ways through the creation of distinct class specializing schemes each of which comprises a single level of member sub-classes.

The Concept of Assertion

  • To the best of my knowledge and belief the concept of assertions as set out in the vision page emerged from work done for the Allied Data Systems Interoperability Agency of NATO in 1996-7 by Steve Timbers, Rob Nissink, Bernhard Kues and myself though I am grateful to Eric Miller of W3C for supplying the label "assertion" which is so much better than that of "information element" which we had been using for this crucial concept.
  • The above work was an effort of strategic design driven by actual user needs and was not subject to the discplines of academic research. For this reason we were not overly concerned at an apparent lack of similar thinking within the body of recent literature. However I was encouraged to find striking parallels within earlier work published by:
    • B Langefors in 1973. "Theoretical Analysis of Information Systems", Auerbach, Philadepphia, PA. Chapter 6. This text introduces a concept called "elementary message" which is essentially the same as an assertion on the dynamic web. with its constituents:
      • Identity of object - on the dynamic web this is called subject URL.
      • Kind of Property - on the dynamic web this is called property URL.
      • Specification - on the dynamic web this is called value.
      • The point in time - on the dynamic web this is part of the provenance.
    • J A Bubenko in1983, "Information Modeling in the Context of System Development" in Lavington,H.A. (ed), Procedings of the IFIP World Congres. North Holland, Ansterdam, 395-411. This text sets out his vision of a knowledge base in these terms: "The KB should also view its domain in a time perspective and not restrict its knowledge only to the current state of the UoD (Universe of Discourse), ... The KB should never 'forget' anything". He also said "There is no concept of 'modifiable store' in the KB and the concepts of updating and deletion consequently do not apply".
    • The above references reveal that the concept of assertions has been around for some thirty years without being actively pursued. (As far as I know these documents are not yet available in digital form).The paucity of further work on this idea may have been due to the dominance of relational database thinking which is based on the concept of maintaining a single variable state for a set of related objects and a failure to anticipate the development of high capacity, high speed data storage at very low cost. Now the growing demand for a web of data that is not bound by the policies and disciplines of a single application system means that Langefors "elementary message" is an idea whose time has come.
    • Significant traces of the work done by myself and others for the British Army and NATO are also to be found in the standard for information exchange developed as part of the Multilateral Interoperability Program (MIP). This is in the public domain under the name of LC2IEDM.

    The Concept of Class Specializing Schemes

    • The other big idea behind the dynamic web is that of class specializing schemes as set out in the vision page. This concept is crucial as the key to growth of a truly global ontology as explained in the paper called "Discussion of the Dynamic Web as a Global Entity". To the best of my knowledge this concept stems from original work done for the British Army in 1995-9 by Ken Allen, Steve Timbers, Peter Lawson, Martin Richley and myself.
    • This work was an endeavor to overcome a practical problem where information systems have to cope with many hierarchic classification systems that overlap. This problem is common to most large and complex enterprises. It is much discussed within the IT industry as a practical issue faced by specialists in data management but has only recently attracted interest in the academic world.
    • We found that integration based on simple mappings between individual classes was unworkable even within a strong command structure. This problem has now been greatly eased by the introduction of a new modeling information modeling language called CBML which is largely based on the idea of class specializing schemes that I now see as crucial to the creation of a global ontology.

    A Personal Statement

    • I wish to make it clear that I would not dare to claim the dynamic web as a major new and original contribution to the world of information technology even though it feels like that to me.
    • I am grateful for the invention of the World Wide Web because this gives me, along with everyone else, the power to publish my own work for all to see and criticise without first getting approval from an academic world in which I have no status. Of course I feel this work deserves to be taken seriously as it is based on 45 years experience at the cutting edge with on-going peer review from within the industry. Should any reader be interested to test and develop my thinking under appropriate academic discipline I would be keen to assist in any way I can.
    • The passion and motive behind my endeavors is simply to discover better, cheaper, more effective ways for people to share knowledge. To this end I hope that readers will help me to identify other work from which I can learn. Please contact me on harryellis@acm.org.

    Associated Published Papers

    • Evidence of the way in which the thinking expressed on this site has matured over the last five years can be found in a number of non-refereed papers published at various conferences as set out below. A copy of this set of four papers is obtainable in 'pdf' form at "www.harryellis.com/armypapers.pdf".