The central thesis of The Web's Awake is that the phenomenal growth and complexity of the web is beginning to outstrip our capability to control it directly. Many have worked on the concept of emergent properties within highly complex systems, concentrating heavily on the underlying mechanics concerned. Few, however, have studied the fundamentals involved from a sociotechnical perspective. In short, the virtual anatomy of the Web remains relatively uninvestigated. The Web's Awake attempts to seriously explore this gap, citing a number of provocative, yet objective, similarities from studies relating to both real world and digital systems. It presents a collage of interlinked facts, assertions, and coincidences, which boldly point to a Web with powerful potential for life.

The author, Philip Tetlow, is a researcher at IBM.

Read his paper, SOA, Glial and the Autonomic Semantic Web Machine, on developerWorks:

Our industry is drowning in a sea of complexity, with software complexity in particular causing significant complications. The natural sciences have been studying complexity for far longer that we could ever pretend. In many of these chaotic patterns, feedback is an essential component for the supporting mechanisms to be sustained. Such self-organising, or autonomic, systems are relatively commonplace in nature and many of their axiomatic workings have now been captured and formalised using abstract models. This paper therefore presents the proposition that such models may be used to address complexity issues within IT problem spaces. In particular it investigates the use of Semantic Web technologies as a means of reducing ambiguity in the design and implementation of automatic solutions for addressing complexity at a number of points in the Software Life Cycle. Additionally, Glial, an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) based prototype language, is introduced for the implementation of such autonomic solutions, including SOA systems.

Last year, the Web Science collaboration was launched by MIT and U. Southampton.

The Web's Awake: An Introduction to the Field of Web Science and the Concept of Web Life