New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph — The Future of the Net

metaweb_graph.GIF

Notes:

Many people have requested this graph and so I am posting my latest version of it. The Metaweb is the coming “intelligent Web” that is evolving from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web. The Metaweb is starting to emerge as we shift from a Web focused on information to a Web focused on relationships between things — what I call “The Relationship Web” or the “Relationship Revolution.”

We see early signs of this shift to a Web of relationships in the sudden growth of social networking systems. As the semantics of these relationships continue to evolve the richness of the “arcs” will begin to rival that of the “nodes” that make up the network.

This is similar to the human brain — individual neurons are not particularly important or effective on their own, rather it is the vast networks of relationships that connect them that encode knowledge and ultimately enable intelligence. And like the human brain, in the future Metaweb, technologies will emerge to enable the equivalent of “spreading activation” to propagate across the network of nodes and arcs. This will provide a means of automatically growing links, weighting links, making recommendations, and learning across distributed graphs of nodes and links. This may resemble a sort of “Hebbian learning” across the link structure of the network — enhancing the strength of frequently used connections and dampening less used links, and even growing new transitive links when appropriate.

As the intelligence with which such processes unfolds, in a totally decentralized and grassroots manner, we will begin to see signs of emergent “transhuman” intelligences on the network. Web services are the beginning of this — but imagine if they were connected to autonomous intelligent agents, roaming the network and able to interact with one another, Web sites, and even people. These next-layer intelligences will begin to function as brokers, associators, editors, publishers, recommenders, advertisers, researchers, defenders, buyers, sellers, monitors, aggregators, distributors, integrators, translators, and also as knowledge-stewards responsible for constantly improving the structure and quality of subsets of the Web that they oversee. And while many of these agents will be able to interact intelligently with humans, not all of them will — most will probably just have interfaces for interacting with other agents.

Vast systems of “hybrid intelligence” (humans + intelligent software) will form — for example, next-generation communities that intelligently self-organize around emerging topics and trends, smart marketplaces that self-optimize to reduce the cost of transactions for their participants, ‘group minds’ and ‘enterprise minds’ that embody and manage the collective cognitiion of teams and organizations, and knowledge networks that function to enable distributed collective intelligence among networks of indivdiuals, across communities and business-relationships.

As the network becomes increasingly autonomous and self-organizing we may say that the network-as-a-whole is becoming “intelligent.” But it will be several steps beyond that before it finally “wakes up” — when the various processes of the network reach that point at which the entire system truly functions as a coordinated, self-aware intelligence. This will require the formation of many higher layers of intelligence — leading to something that functions like the cerebral cortex in humans. It will also require something that functions as its virtual “self-awareness” — an internal process of meta-level self-representation, self-projection, self-feedback, self-analysis and self-improvement within the network. For a map of how this may actually unfold over time we might look at the evolutionary history of nervous systems on Earth.

As structures that provide virtual higher-order cognition and self-awareness to the network emerge, connect to one another, and gain sophistication, the Global Brain will self-organize into a Global Mind — the intelligence of the whole will begin to outpace the intelligence of any of its parts and thus it will cross the threshold from being just a “bunch of interacting parts” to “a new higher-order whole” in its own right — a global intelligent Metaweb for our planet.

Social tagging: > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >

17 Responses to New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph — The Future of the Net

  1. The Metaweb

    Novas Pivack has updated his Metaweb Graph. He describes the evolution of standard web, semantic web, and social software technologies into the Metaweb (and beyond). This reads like Alvin Toffler barreling into Vernor Vinge’s territory, although the am…

  2. Raw says:

    Nova’s Metaweb and Machine Consciousness

    A good read, but I’d like to call Nova on two points: one technical, one political/philosophical. Firstly, in the diagram…

  3. Raw says:

    Nova’s Metaweb and Machine Consciousness

    A good read, but I’d like to call Nova on two points: one technical, one political/philosophical. Firstly, in the diagram…

  4. Nova Spivack’s MetaWeb vision updated

    Great vision update. The blogosphere is a very crude prototype for the Global Mind and Global brain. From Minding the Planet: New Version of My “Metaweb” Graph — The Future of the Net: QUOTEAs structures that provide virtual higher-order cognition…

  5. NearWalden says:

    Nova’s MetaWeb chart

    Nova’s latest version of his evolution of the web chart.

  6. BruBlog says:

    The new codewitch.org

    As you may have noticed, since the beginning of may codewitch.org has a whole new layout. The reasons are mainly that: I didn’t like the old look anymore It had lot of visalization bugs (especially under Microsoft platforms) It was not clean and clear …

  7. BruBlog says:

    The new codewitch.org

    As you may have noticed, since the beginning of may codewitch.org has a whole new layout. The reasons are mainly that: I didn’t like the old look anymore It had lot of visalization bugs (especially under Microsoft platforms) It was not clean and clear …

  8. BruBlog says:

    The new codewitch.org

    As you may have noticed, since the beginning of may codewitch.org has a whole new layout. The reasons are mainly that: I didn’t like the old look anymore It had lot of visalization bugs (especially under Microsoft platforms) It was not clean and clear …

  9. BruBlog says:

    The new codewitch.org

    As you may have noticed, since the beginning of may codewitch.org has a whole new layout. The reasons are mainly that: I didn’t like the old look anymore It had lot of visalization bugs (especially under Microsoft platforms) It was not clean and clear…

  10. MetabWeb -> SW + SN

    Nova Spivack의 “Metaweb” 그래프. 한쪽의 축을 Semantic Web 기술을 염두에 둔 Information connectivity 발전으로 설정하고, 다른 하나의 축은 Social Network 기술을 염두에 두고 social connectivity 발전으로 가정한 후, Semantic Web과 Social Network 기술이 합쳐…

  11. MetabWeb -> SW + SN

    Nova Spivack의 “Metaweb” 그래프. 한쪽의 축을 Semantic Web 기술을 염두에 둔 Information connectivity 발전으로 설정하고, 다른 하나의 축은 Social Network 기술을 염두에 두고 social connectivity 발전으로 가정한 후, Semantic Web과 Social Network 기술이 합쳐…

  12. MetabWeb -> SW + SN

    Nova Spivack의 “Metaweb” 그래프. 한쪽의 축을 Semantic Web 기술을 염두에 둔 Information connectivity 발전으로 설정하고, 다른 하나의 축은 Social Network 기술을 염두에 두고 social connectivity 발전으로 가정한 후, Semantic Web과 Social Network 기술이 합쳐…

  13. Hot Futures says:

    The Future of the Web

    Minding the Planet: My “Metaweb” Graph — The Future of the Net Many people have requested this graph and so I am posting my latest version of it. The Metaweb is the coming “intelligent Web” that is evolving from…

  14. Hot Futures says:

    The Future of the Web

    Minding the Planet: My “Metaweb” Graph — The Future of the Net Many people have requested this graph and so I am posting my latest version of it. The Metaweb is the coming “intelligent Web” that is evolving from…

  15. Hot Futures says:

    The Future of the Web

    Minding the Planet: My “Metaweb” Graph — The Future of the Net I thought this might be very interesting and maybe a good topic for discussion at one of our meetings soon. This is some of what Nova had…

  16. ::microlearning:: opening of the conference

    Peter Bruck opens the conference with a few examples of people who have to learn foreign languages. Sometimes you have people who live a lot of years in a country without learning the language.
    This conference is about looking at the needs of people like

  17. Cool video

    I like this video on digital media and where we’re headed. For me, it evoked thoughts on why I get excited about my FeedDemon RSS reader and NetVibes interface – delivering me a more personalized information experience than was previously