| Future Internet |
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by Graham Hench Future Internet - a term which at times comes across as a contrived prediction with earnest intentions - can be currently understood as an open challenge. It’s an idea, a vision, a collection of optimistic objectives and proposed solutions, requiring global, cross-domain, collaborative effort. It’s the coined name of the international initiative led by the European Commission to preempt the coming challenges as our modern society becomes more dependent upon and immersed with networked technologies. The visionaries behind the Future Internet foresee scenarios which demand innovative solutions beyond the capacity of our current Internet; of course this is not to imply the status quo is satisfactory. Current trends indicate continual increase in the data, resources, and users of the Internet. In 2006, 161 exabytes of information were created or replicated worldwide. Further IDC estimates include a forecasted increase of over six times this metric by 2010 to 988 exabytes/year. Total user statistics are creeping towards 2 billion, with over a 300% increase since 2000, however this still only totals to a 21.9% global penetration rate. Broadband delivery is improving but not quickly nor broadly enough. Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, and visionary behind the Future Internet, correctly noted, “today’s internet was not designed with 100 Megabit-per-second data rates in mind.” The race is on with two major cruxes: increasing speed and increasing size (users, data, resources, etc.). Such obstacles must be overcome to increase ecommerce, open markets, and stimulate the global economy, as Commissioner Reding remarked at last year’s OECD Ministerial Meeting on the future of the Internet economy: “High-speed Internet is the passport to the information society and an essential condition for economic growth.” Her prediction encompasses, “seamless 'anytime, anywhere' business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks. It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines. It signals a tenfold quantum leap in the scale of the digital universe by 2015.” In addition to scaling to cope with the increasing amount of users and networked information - and the ubiquitous mobile delivery plans - new elements of the Future Internet, such as the Internet of Things, further complicate the challenge. The Internet of Things - where every physical object becomes an online addressable resource – will rely on minuscule radio tags attached to objects forming a seamless connection of devices, sensors, and identifiable objects through fixed and wireless networks. There are currently some 2 billion of these radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags in use; experts predict this number to rise 300-fold in the next ten years. The market value for RFID is expected to grow 5 times worldwide by 2018 with the promise of delivering innovative applications. All of these clear signs that the Internet of Things is quickly expanding beyond research labs. STI International; as we prepare for the next Future Internet activities, we anticipate increased participation from members of the European semantic technology community. The sheer complexity of a mobile, ubiquitous, Internet of Things - with ever-increasing users and content - places the current Internet architecture under strain. The solution, to bring order to this massive network and allow it to become operational, will be the Internet of Services. The new Internet of Services will foster an interoperability framework for service integration, authentication, privacy and security, which in turn will enable the Web-based service industry to procure, extend and repurpose services for new markets. In the context of the Future Internet, the key goal of the Internet of Services is to pursue the achievement of a “continuity of services”. Continuity of services has two main perspectives, namely: the service consumer and the service provider. Service consumers look for perfect interactivity, i.e. permanent (interactivity at anytime), transparent (the service consumer need only concentrate on the benefits of the service he/she is using), seamless (the interaction is performed using “typical” devices appropriate to the current context), trustworthy (secure, private, and safe). Service providers require new approaches to management where the complexity of the central control principle is shifted towards the simplicity of the approach to keep the consistency of each service. The Internet of Services aims to support and stimulate creativity, community and commerce. It foresees ubiquitous, user-centred services which will be enriched through semantics. Two challenges met by adding semantics to the coming Internet of Services are: ✦ Scalability - The increasing scale of the Internet forces us to rethink how computation may be distributed, using resources optimally. Such initiatives as the adaptive services grid have already been undertaken and show that a lot of challenges remain unaddressed. Approaches to tackling scalability include openness - lowering the barriers to entry; and semantics – enabling the mechanization of certain tasks currently carried out by humans. ✦ Interoperability - This applies at many different levels: i) service interoperability to provide an automated capability to integrate stand-alone services with services which are similar or complementary, for instance from a related business domain; ii) data interoperability, so as to provide the automated understanding of the information exchanged and ensure the overall quality of the service; (iii) interoperability of the service layer with the network and application layers of different providers. From a quality of service perspective, such improved semantic interoperability techniques facilitate composition and middleware support. There is a need for semantics in order to meet the challenges presented by the dramatic increase in the sheer scale of the coming Internet of Services. As listed in a white paper by STI International President Prof. John Domingue, key applications of semantic technologies include: ✦ Intelligent large scale content access – specifying what is desired or required in a way which captures the relevant context and is separated from the location, ownership, and technical details of the content. ✦ Identity – the ability to uniquely specify and identify the actors and artefacts at Internet scale is not solved. Note that uniform naming schemes are also a partial solution. The ability to interpret, for example, “The British Prime Minister” and “Gordon Brown” as the same individual is paramount. ✦ Scalable reasoning – the ability to reason over billions or trillions of data items, and to offer partial results in a coherent understandable manner is key. ✦ Mapping meanings at scale – automatically linking and mapping between large volumes of data items represented in different formats will be essential for many Internet related activities. For example, mapping between photo data (location, time and owner) for the contents of Facebook and Flickr is not feasible in an automated fashion at present. ✦ Trust at scale – within scenarios where large volumes of data are integrated on-the-fly from multiple sources and online brokers act as intermediaries enabling trust will require extensive research. Semantic technologies could provision the future Internet of Services with automated inference in the following ways: ✦ Inference with search – combining in an intelligent fashion the activities of locating data with creating new data through inference; ✦ Inference and human computation – a number of interesting recent scenarios have demonstrated that people masquerading as intelligent services (“Artificial Artificial Intelligence”) can be used to resolve tasks which are currently computationally intractable. A seamless combination of logical reasoning and human computation is required in the networked age. ✦ Inference and social network processes – the benefits in leveraging the power evident when human social processes become visible online has been shown by the value of companies such as Facebook and Bebo. Tightly linking online social arenas to logic based reasoning will open up completely new markets and opportunities. STI International oversees the utilization of semantic technologies through its support of several collaborative pan-European meetings organized by the European Commission under the Future Internet. The first was the Future Internet Assembly in March of 2008, which took place in Bled, Slovenia and resulted in the BLED declaration: a visionary document pledging commitment and common interest, published and endorsed by over 70 European research project. Since then, there have been further Assemblies in Madrid, Spain and Prague, Czech Republic, as well as several other events and conference series, such as the Future Internet Symposium (FIS) organized each fall by STI International. The European Commission committed to driving the Future Internet initiative for the next decade, as it becomes the core model for the ICT work programme. In its first year, the Future Internet initiative has now attracted support from 93 European research projects. Prof. John Domingue, STI President and Deputy Director of KMi at The Open University is a caretaker of the Future Internet Service Offer working group of the Future Internet initiative. Additionally, he co-chairs the Semantic Technology and Ontologies technical group of the European Commission’s Internet of Services collaboration effort and co-edited the FIA book, “Towards the Future Internet - A European Research Perspective.” Last November, STI International co-organized two networking sessions focusing on the future Internet of Services and the potential role of semantic technologies at the ICT Event 2008 in Lyon, France. In the past year, enabling the Future Internet has quickly become a prime research objective of STI International; as we prepare for the coming sessions in next Future Internet activities, we anticipate increased participation from members of the European semantic technology community. The Future Internet may be a European initiative, but its focus is the development of an improved communication network requiring an increase in scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, and utilization of current Internet technologies worldwide. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilization of the Internet. Global efforts are now contributing towards the Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content which now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meeting the needs of our knowledge society. These challenges are encompassed in the scenarios of the Future Internet. The vision behind the Future Internet is steered and supported by the European Commission and organizations such as STI International. Together we aim to develop a new ubiquitous mobile network consisting of things and services; join in our ambitious effort in providing such an Internet for our next generation. |
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