I have been reading through the http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/
wonderful reports on the scale
of information being created. I was wondering they had tried to relate
this information to the power-laws embodied in the scale-free networks?
I was also wondering if you had any plans, or knew of plans, to expand your
research to include number of services on the web (eg. RSS, Web-Pages, etc),
and also the complexity of computer programs themselves. You might look
as the rate of RSS feeds going on-line, collected nicely at http://syndic8.com/
and included here.
Anyway, I feel that the complexity of information being created
and modified, all the way to services and objects, is going off the charts.
Large scale application development efforts are also failing since they cannot deal
with the scale and modifications. It seems that information and computer science has to come up with
new computing paradigms to keep up with the unbounded scalability. It seems
that information science has to find ways to deal with this - and also that
the interaction with computer science is very blurred.
Other areas and technologies that are trying to solve this are the sensor networks,
using technologies such as Directed Diffusion, and the Mesh Networks and aspects
of the semantic web. Any thoughts you could share on the "information science" approaches
to scalability would be appreciated.
