Re: Carbon Efficiency of Semantic Web and Linked Data Queries

As an aside (because it does not specifically tackle the Semantic Web or
Linked Data but might still be relevant wrt the broader issue at hand), I
was the co-author of this report: Towards Digital Sobriety
<https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/lean-ict-our-new-report/>.

For a quick presentation see:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2195771-digital-sobriety-can-halt-tech-fuelled-global-warming-says-report/


All the best,
Alexandre Monnin

On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 6:31 PM Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:

> My guess is that such studies have not been done, mostly because widespread
> deployment as would happen if Solid became widespread has not happened
> yet.
>
> But there are some reasons one could be optimistic.
>
> 1. everyone has a DSL box at home currently that is on and not doing much
> a lot of the day, so consuming energy for nothing. Instead with Solid Pods
> those would be doing something useful, and could use electricity from solar
> energy produced locally. So you don’t increase local electricity costs
> that much, you can use locally produced electricity, but you increase some
> consumption of data.
>
> 2. It is likely that most people communicate with local friends, and in
> most case don’t cross frontiers due to language barriers. This may not be
> the case for the W3C community, but for the wider populations this is a
> lot more likely.  So in a way Solid pods communicating with local friends
> would use less energy, since packets would not need to be sent around the
> world.
>
> 3. There are a lot of optimization strategies that can be made by having
> widely deployed pods. For example used in p2p networks, by fetching copies
> of data heavy media in the nearest cache.
>
> 4. With the internet of things growing, having the packets stay as far as
> required in the home rather than go to large service providers, should
> also improve data costs as well as privacy. That is the role of a local DSL
> box turned into a data pod is in any case going to grow in importance, so
> one may as well use this growing infrastructure.
>
> Since producing energy locally is more efficient, and communicating locally
> when that is needed is better, there are reasons to think that some of
> the advantages of large providers may be offset in other ways. That is
> without counting the huge improvements in efficiency in communication
> that come with HTTP2, reactive frameworks, and cpu efficiencies.
>
> Henry
>
> > On 16 Jun 2019, at 12:41, Marco Neumann <marco.neumann@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Has anybody done work on Carbon Efficiency of Semantic Web and Linked
> Data Queries?
> >
> > The very nature of distributed data sets has to come with a substantial
> computational footprint every time a query is issued to a single node or a
> cluster of nodes for a federated query. On the other hand decentralization
> might actually outperform more centralized services in the future.
> >
> > I can find a number of papers and articles related to carbon efficiency
> in general computing and cloud computing environments and data centers but
> nothing specifically related to the improvement of operational efficiency
> introduced by Semantic Web and Linked Data infrastructures.
> >
> > There is CO2GLE which attempts to estimate the CO2 emissions per second
> released by web search engines like Google as a reference here:
> >
> >
> https://qz.com/1267709/every-google-search-results-in-co2-emissions-this-real-time-dataviz-shows-how-much/
> >
> >
> > Regards,
> > Marco
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> > ---
> > Marco Neumann
> > KONA
> >
>
>
>