Re: Future Internet Symposium - Vienna, Austria, September 28-30 - Call for Participation

Dan, I will keep this email short and just outline the main headlines.

The main driver for this is twofold: a) the current Internet was  
designed according to criteria which do not match today's usage, and  
b) the 1.3B Internet users will rise to nearly 4B with mobile phone  
usage. We need to align mobile networks with computer networks and  
take into account the needs the Media industry within the basic  
infrastructure. Issues such as the IP Bottleneck are also a driver.

There are similar initiatives in other regions of the world all taking  
a "clean slate" approach (a completely new design). For example, in  
Japan there's the "AKARI" Architecture Design Project
for New Generation Network (http://akari-project.nict.go.jp/) and in  
the US there's the GENIE project (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=109589 
). Funding for these projects range from 10s of millions to 100s of  
millions (euros or dollars). The work I've seen so far primarily  
focuses on a network and services layer, and providing experimental  
facilities for testing specific architectures (see for example  
PlanetLab https://www.planet-lab.org/). Of course there are in fact  
many possibilities for tackling such a large problem such as defining  
a new Internet. In terms of the relationship between the current  
Internet and a Future one, one technology which is prevalent is  
Overlay Networks where one can create a virtual new network which runs  
alongside the existing Internet and the carry out a gradual changeover.

Semantics can be used to address many of the agreed challenges  
associated with the Future Internet in a relatively obvious way. Some  
of the main challenges which have emerged from various working groups  
that I'm involved in include: Scalability, Trust, Pervasive Usability,  
Interoperability and Mobility. Semantics as a topic is taken into  
consideration in Future Internet meetings. The Web is not.

I recommend the European Future Internet Portal (http://www.future-internet.eu/ 
) as well as the advertised Symposium a good starting point for  
looking more closely at this area.

regards

john

On 8 Sep 2008, at 21:22, Dan Brickley wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> John Domingue wrote:
>> ***Apologies for cross postings****
>
> (no worries, hope it's ok to treat it as discussion fodder...)
>
>> [http://www.fis2008.org]
>> We are pleased to announce the Future Internet Symposium (FIS 2008)  
>> which will take place in Vienna, Austria, September 28-30.  FIS  
>> 2008 will provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from  
>> academia and industry to exchange ideas related to the Future  
>> Internet - a new planet scale network able to truly meet the  
>> societal and business demands of the 21st Century.
>
> Could you tell us a bit more about it? Is there buy-in to the notion  
> of a "Future Internet" from outside the European funding zone, or is  
> this somehow the European Future Internet? To what extent do you  
> expect specs defined over the good old Internet (eg. the current Web  
> stack) to work just fine in this new Internet? The impression I get  
> from http://www.future-internet.eu/ is that this is a central  
> organising concept for the next phase of 'futuristic Internet'  
> funding/research/etc in Europe, but it's unclear how literally to  
> take the talk of a 'new network'.
>
> Re the "a new planet scale network able to truly meet the societal  
> and business demands of the 21st Century." part, is there a  
> suggestion that the Web as currently defined ( http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/ 
>  and suchlike) is failing society in ways that can be improved by a  
> better Internet layer?  To what extent do you see those changes  
> affecting the kinds of thing we care about in the SemWeb world?  
> Should we expect discussion of a "Future Web" too?
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
> --
> http://danbri.org/
>

__________________________
Prof. John Domingue,
Knowledge Media Institute,
The Open University,
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK6 7AA
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/domingue/

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