Re: Evolution of the RWW -- a Temporal Web -- Towards Web 4.0 (?)

I initially want to celebrate Melvin...  His minds output, is meaningful
upon so many...

Nathan --> :) hope you're well :)

otherwise - broadly, entirely supported...  but lots more 'thinking'
required...

more later.

Timothy Holborn.

On Fri, 14 May 2021 at 23:58, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
wrote:

> For years in this group (tho less actively recently) we've been exploring
> ways to read and write to the web, in a standards based way
>
> The foundational principle was that the first browser was a browser/editor
> and that both reading and writing to the web should be possible, preferably
> using a standards-based approach
>
> Fundamentally writing is a more difficult problem then reading, because
> inevitably you want to be able to control who writes to what, in order to,
> preserve a degree of continuity
>
> This has lead to the concept of what I'll loosely call web access control
> (tho there's also the capability based approach) which in turn required
> work to be done on (web) identity, users, and groups
>
> The standards based approach to declarative data, with different agents
> operating on it, in a linked way, has started to take some shape, including
> with the solid project, and I think approximates to what timbl has branded,
> at various times, as web 3.0 / semantic web
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web#Web_3.0
>
> So far, so good
>
> However solid, and even the web, to a degree is something of an ephemeral
> web, rather than having both a temporal and an spacial aspect to it.  I
> suppose this was by design and in line with the so-called "principle of
> least power"
>
> The challenge with building multi agent systems on a semantic linked,
> access control web is that they lack robustness over time.  This makes them
> hard to compete with the centralized server.  You run an agent (for those
> few of us that have built them) and then they'll sit on your desktop, or a
> server, or if you can compile it, on your phone
>
> And interact with the web of linked data, but in a quite ephemeral way.
> Turn your machine off, and the agent is off, soon to be forgotten except
> for a missing piece of functionality.  People will forget where which agent
> was running, or what it does, and there's nothing to handle operation in
> time, leading to race conditions, lack of sync, race conditions,  and even
> network infinite loops
>
> While some temporal aspects are built into web standards, such as etags
> and memento, as well as various time vocabs, and VCS, I think we'll all
> agree that they are hard to work with.  And from my experience also lack
> robustness
>
> Timbl wrote a very interesting design note on this matter called Paper
> Trail
>
> https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/PaperTrail
>
> In it he talks about the evolution of documents over time, through reading
> and writing, and how you can keep a paper trail of that.  I think it's
> quite a visionary work which anticipates things that came after it such as
> public block chains
>
> I think the paper trail concept is something that has yet to be fully (or
> perhapd even partially) realized
>
> Now (in 2021) public block chains are an established technology.  In
> particular they act as robust timestamp servers on the internet, which can
> provide a heart beat to web based systems, either sites, server, or, as
> described before agents that can then operate over time and have themselves
> anchored in external systems which can reasonably be expected to be around
> for at least several years.  The more unimpaired ones at least
>
> This enables agents to start to develop both over the web of data, but
> also evolve in time, at web scale.  Adding a quality of temporal
> robustness, to multi-agents systems that can operate in both time (history)
> and space (data), together with their own source code which can evolve too
>
> A functioning read-write web with properly functioning multi-agent systems
> seems to me to be an evolution of the (read-write) web, in line with the
> design principles that informed the original web.  ie universality,
> decentralization, modularity, simplicity, tolerance, principle of least
> power
>
> Since web 3.0 is branded as the semantic web a temporal RWW would seems to
> build on that, and it's what I'm loosely calling "web 4.0" for a backwards
> compatible web including semantic agents, that are time aware, and hence,
> robust enough to run real world applications, and interact with each
> other.  I got the idea for this term from neuroscientist and programmer Dr.
> Maxim Orlovsky who is also developing systems of multi-agent systems,
> within the "RGB" project.  It would seem to be a nice moniker, but I've
> cc'd timbl on this in case he disapproves (or approves!)
>
> I have started working on the first of these agents, and it is going very
> well.  Over time I will hopefully share libraries, frameworks, apps and
> documentation/specs that will show the exact way in which read-write agents
> can evolve in history
>
> My first system is what I call, "web scale version control" (thanks to
> Nathan for that term).  What it will do is, allow agents and systems to
> commit simultaneously to both a VCS and a block chain in order to create a
> robust "super commit" allowing a number of side-effects such as, auditable
> history, prevention of race conditions, reconstruction from genesis,
> continuously deployed evolution, ability to run autonomously and more.  In
> this way you can commit an agents code and state, without relying on a
> centralized service like github, can easily move, or restart on another VCS
> or server
>
> This can be used to create robust multi-agent systems that can run and
> operate against the RWW, as it exists today, thereby creating new
> functionality.  I'll be releasing code, docs, and apps over time and
> hopefully a framework so that others can easily create an agent in what
> will be (hopefully) a multi agent read write web
>
> If you've got this far, thanks for reading!
>
> If you have any thoughts, ideas or use-cases, or wish to collaborate, feel
> free to reply, or send a message off-list
>
> Best
> Melvin
>
> cc: timbl
>