Walking Our Way to the Web

to reflect on how we could walk the delicate path to the full potential of the Web,
finding the missing links and avoiding the one too many links.
goal:

the World-Wide Way?
03
the World-Wide Wave?
02
the World-Wide What ?
01
the Web We Weave?
04
the World Wild Web?
05
the World Wide Warning?
06
the Web We Wrecked?
07
the Web Wide World?
08
the World We Want?
09
… Where We Went?
10

the World-Wide What ?
What is the Web?

female
male
the Web in medias res
according to demographics in 2022, the Web is
older than half of the world's population.
the Web is both well-known and at the same time
poorly understood.
e.g. the tenacious and all-too-often made
confusion between the terms Web and Internet.

statistical learning from the Web

Internet
inter-connection between
computer networks and
connected objects in
general.
communication
infrastructure that supports
numerous applications
such as: email, phoning,
and videoconferencing
Web
one of the applications of
Internet.
a vast network of
interconnected information
and resources that exists
as a result of human and
automated contributions,
communication and
interaction.
a distributed hypermedia
that has become the
primary software
architecture for
applications on the Internet.
just to be on the same (web) page

pillars of the Web
URL
HTML
HTTP
identification
address
communication
WEB

What
Web ?
The architecture of the Web is
based on protocols, models,
languages and algorithms that
need to be specified,
designed, proven and
validated, and will typically
consider constraints such as
those related to upscaling,
efficiency in time and memory,
interoperability, and
internationalization.
Note: from the very beginning,
the key concepts of the Web
architecture raised
philosophical questions
reopening issues of reference,
representation and meaning .
The hypermedia artefact that
emerged, the complexity of its
usages, the heterogeneity and
volume of its content, services,
and data, the dynamic nature
of some of its traffic and
sources, and the variety of life
cycles of its resources and
communities, are such
sources of complexity that
they also call for a scientific
approach and for theoretical,
applied, experimental, and
multi-disciplinary research and
development
The term ‘Web’ is used
 on one hand to refer to its
software architecture and
founding principles,
 and on the other hand to
refer to the artefact that
emerged from it i.e. a
distributed hypermedia
weaved by its billions of
users.
Each facet exhibits, in different
ways, complexities which call
for study, research and
development possibly relying
on different methods.

the World-Wide Wave?
which human activity hasn’t been impacted by the Web?

one possible timeline (eras)
pre-Web
computers and their
networks were used
primarily by
computer experts
and researchers
…1989
early Web
development of first
Web browsers,
servers and
websites &
establishment of the
key standards and
protocols
…1994
Web boom
rapid growth and
widespread
adoption, for a
variety of purposes
initially driven by the
information-sharing
service it
immediately offers
…2000
“Web 2.0”
new approaches for
users to interact and
contribute in more
dynamic and
customizable
manners opening
the way to online
social media and
massive user-
generated content.
2000…
Web of everything
linked data and
semantic Web
period was invisible
making the Web
more usable for
programs ;
Web of things
connecting objects
of all types to the
Web…
…

another timeline (events)
Web Pillars
first web browser,
and server, HTTP
protocol, URL and
the first website
~1990
W3C
The World Wide
Web Consortium,
dedicated to the
development of
Web standards and
technologies
~1994
Javascript
programming
language, which
allows web
developers to create
interactive and
dynamic web pages
~1995
Web search
Yahoo directory,
Altavista search
engine and finally
Google search
engine
…1998
Mobile Web
PDA, Smartphones,
tablets, etc. the
Web access means
become highly
mobile and always
connected
2005…

many other timelines (to be studied)
…
…
…
…
…
…
e-commerce
…
…
sharing
…
…
…
…
…

now common Web’s concepts
words
that are now used
everyday
homepage
Web address
Web site
Web page
Web browser
Web server

now common Web’s hybrids
existing concepts
revisited, augmented,
extended,… by the
Web
Web OS
Webinar / Web conference
Web radio / tv / casts
Weblog
Web documentaries / series /
tutorial / webisode …
Webcam
Web sourcing
Web ID

e.g. bookmark
Webmark
extended to resources
beyond pages
Web bookmark
virtual resource &practice
Web page
virtual document
Bookmark
physical object & practice
Book and Page
of the physical world

the World-Wide Way ?
What is specific about the Web?

Web principles
low entry-barrier, usability, unified
interface, copy-paste, …
Simplicity
no central control, distributed
system, agent control over
resources, open world, …
Decentralization
hypermedia, users and
applications navigate, self-
descriptions, …
Linked Resources
open and accessible to all, uniform
interface for humans and for
machines, portable, 404, ...
Tolerant interoperability
open standards, heterogeneous
resources, visible, extensible, ...
Openness
closely-coupled features and
components, independent and
partial deployment,…
Modularity
universal/uniform resource locator,
universal/uniform interface,
accessibility, separation of concerns,
…
Universality and uniformity
Withstand changes, accommodate
future evolutions, evolvability, …
Timelessness
user-perceived performance,
functioning at Internet-scale,
stateless communication,…
Scalability, availability, efficiency

most popular one sorted
by descending number of
active users in 2022.
Social Networks
largest one in terms of
population, inserted in
that view
Countries

richness
and complexity
With the advent of the
Web, we individually
have to face humanity
in all its scale and
diversity

detecting cyber-bullying in CREEP
[Cabrio, Villata et al.]

the Web We Weave ?
What as the Web become?

we do not know the Web we weave
“the original idea of the web was that it should be
a collaborative space where you can
communicate through sharing information”
The Web architecture is designed through
standards following an open and documented
social process.
The participatory nature of the Web hypermedia
makes it emerge as an openly co-constructed
global artefact.
We design its architecture but the Web artefact
that emerges and constantly evolves, needs to
be studied and followed in all its developments.
Tim Berners-Lee

evolution & endangered species

one web for humans & machines
service
Forms and
services
generating pages
for their results
dynamic
information
Web pages for
humans.
static
social
Large scale social
interaction and
sharing
shared
application
Complex
interfaces and
programs running
in our browsers
interactive
data
Machine readable
data exchange on
the Web by
programs
formal
AI
More and more
intelligent
processing
happening on the
Web
active

Linking data since 1999
From the beginning, the core idea of the Web
was to link as many things through as many
links and from as many sources as possible
the Semantic Web is not a separate Web but
rather an “extension in which information is
given well-defined meaning, better enabling
computers and people to work in cooperation”
we witness the rise of two powerful resources
linked on the Web: formal knowledge and
artificial intelligence.
a semantic-webby Web

URI, IRI, URL, HTTP URI
JSON
RDF
JSON LD
N‐Triple
N‐Quad
Turtle/N3
TriG
RDFS
OWL
SPARQL
XML
HTML
RDF XML
HTTP
Linked Data
CSV‐LD R2RML
GRDDL
RDFa
SHACL
LDP
Data and Schemata Standards on the web

linked open datasets
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
0 1 / 0 5 / 2 0 0 7 0 8 / 1 0 / 2 0 0 7 0 7 / 1 1 / 2 0 0 7 1 0 / 1 1 / 2 0 0 7 2 8 / 0 2 / 2 0 0 8 3 1 / 0 3 / 2 0 0 8 1 8 / 0 9 / 2 0 0 8 0 5 / 0 3 / 2 0 0 9 2 7 / 0 3 / 2 0 0 9 1 4 / 0 7 / 2 0 0 9 2 2 / 0 9 / 2 0 1 0 1 9 / 0 9 / 2 0 1 1 3 0 / 0 8 / 2 0 1 4 2 6 / 0 1 / 2 0 1 7

IndeGx & Kartographi
Linked
Data
geographical provenance
endpoints and their geolocation with coherence checking
what ontologies, schemata, thesauri are used.
(meta-)vocabularies used

Web as human-technology holobiont
Web  Creativity
the Web supports our creativity.
Creativity  Web
our creativity feeds the Web.
“thinking and reasoning systems whose
minds and selves are spread across
biological brain and non-biological
circuitry”
human-technology symbionts (A Clark)
“mental states (…) partly
constituted by the states of
other thinkers”
Social-extended cognition
(Clark & Chalmers) “assemblage of a host and the
many other species living in or
around it, which together form
a symbiotic unit”
Holobiont
“the Web immersed our
intelligence in a larger system as a
new stage in our tendency
towards cognitive hybridization”
human-technology holobiont

the World Wild Web?
A vast and heterogenous landscape without governance?

As the Web spreads in the World…
fake
Content
spam
Content
… the World spreads in the Web.
misinformation
Content
malicious
Content
harmful
Content

an evolution not under control, by design
01
02
03
04
organizations and standards
bodies play a role in the
development and governance of
some aspects of the Web, the
most important being W3C.
Standardized architecture
shaped by the collective actions
and decisions of millions of users,
developers, and organizations.
Open contributions
constantly changing technological,
social, and economic landscape.
Applications & services emerge
The result of conflicting or competing
interests the Web itself is ultimately decentralized
and distributed in nature , and, by
design, is not fully under the control of
any one person or organization.
Web is subject to many
unpredictable and complex forces,
and is not always easy to predict
or channel.
Usages emerged

an active media, more and more autonomous
automatic processing of the representations that circulate on
it and of their meaning, with capacities and scope that make
it singular compared to any other technology or media
AI augments these behaviours
It is a network of human and technical agents that raises
pressing questions of traceability, explainability and trust.
the Web becomes ever more complex
needs for customized descriptions of the context in terms of
security, privacy, intentions, and more generally automated
processing happening around the users.
describe and explain that context to the users
to support world-wide hybrid communities of human and
software agents and address complex problems.
multidisciplinary Web development
in Web sites, during
access, between
humans, between
machines, etc.
Content &
Interactions

Privacy Bird with chirping privacy indicator
[LF Cranor]

bad privacy indicator
[LF Cranor]

the World Wide Warning?
the potential risks and challenges that the Web can pose?

Tim Berners-Lee
1996
the diversifying force
provided by geography
could be weakened by
the Web

Many ambivalences sit at the heart of
the Web, and its future [Manifesto]
The consequences run deep, with the Web reopening on a world-wide
stage the questions about the notions of true, false and truth.
05
sustainability vs.
growth
01 information
freedom vs.
information
quality
02
personalisation
vs. privacy
03
mass participation
vs. manipulation of
the masses
04
inclusiveness
and fairness vs.
exploitation

a never-ending project
perpetual changes are in the very
nature of the Web.
constant attention
setup infrastructures to raise
warning whenever this is needed.
continous evolution
the question is not to stop change
but to deal with it.
changes are neither good nor bad
each one has the potential to bring as
much inconvenience as benefit.
maintain a constant attention
W W
W W

web index: the state of the web

the Web We Wrecked?
have we broken some parts of the Web?

the ability offered by its open standards, open sources,
open contents, etc. to rely on contributions from all
over the world to address its problems.
But are we over-estimating this autocorrection ability?
the Web often benefits from its
autocorrection capability

browser wars ~ 1994
the competition for
dominance in the usage
share of Web browsers
can lead to nonstandard
extensions of the Web
and break its essential
interoperability property
CDA ~ 1996
Communications
Decency Amendment in
1996 part the
Telecommunications Act
passed by American
Congress to ban the
transmission of obscene
or indecent material and
that could have killed
the Web in its infancy.
the Web has known dangerous periods in the past

loosing important properties
access loss
governments, companies,
that censor the web or
restrict access to certain
sites or content
no more global
non standard extensions,
polarized, filtered,
clustered, discriminated,
customized, … fostering
communitarianism
neutrality loss
introducing or
augmenting inequality
in the access to the
Web
opaque
in the growing automation
we lost a lot in terms of
traceability, explainability
and transparency

schema
one ontology, one
vocabulary, one
referential, …
data
silos of collected
data : personal,
profile, browsing
history
infrastructure
one internet
provider, one
access means…
application
one search engine, one
social media, one
mobile application, one
authentication
service…

where the Web has been broken
Hidden
Traps
Large-scale Spontaneous Echo Chambers
limiting the exposure to diverse perspectives and favouring the formation of groups of like-minded
users forming and amplifying the same discourse
Automated Uncontrolled Filter Bubbles
the state of cultural and intellectual isolation resulting from the automated selection and personalisation of
content, recommendations, search results or notification based on criteria and algorithms only sometimes
transparent.
Purposefully Designed Digital Prisons
using a variety of techniques (click bait farms, dark patterns, infinite scrolling, etc.) to capture users’
attention in an infinite hypermedia maze tailored for them and designed to enclose their browsing.

You will read this first
Then you will read this…
Then this…
and only now are you reading this top left text… predictable means manipulable

caution in coupling Web’s scale and AI efficiency

will only augment
with the latest (AI)
techniques
already in place
same traps
for machines
a content generating
technique, for
instance abused in
search engine
optimization
Automated Spinning
fake groups of sites
that are artificially
highly interlinked to
increasing ranking
Link Farming
dataset polluted by
non relevant entries
added to inject
spam in
applications.
Data Spamming

With ChatGPT
starting from one
paragraph from
the Web site of
Inria
Text Spinning
between generation methods
and detection methods, and
with a cost.
arms race
…

the Web Wide World?
is the Web reconfiguring our relationship to the World?

Web-Augmented Interaction
“a user’s interaction with a system that is improved by allowing the system to access
Web resources in the background in order to analyse, specify or enrich the user’s
requests or the system’s responses, for the benefit of the user (matching her goals,
tasks and interaction context).” [Gandon & Giboin]

[Buffa et al.]

[Cabrio et al.]

the Web modified our relationship with time & space
recording traces of our actions
e.g.
access to information that is not locally available
e.g.
interacting with distant people and things
e.g.
documenting a variety of activities
e.g.
revisit them and re-experience a
posteriori and remotely
e.g.
find these traces and content easily.
e.g.

the Web replaced / displaced many activities
you don’t go to the bank to check your account
e.g.
you don’t go to the train station to book tickets
e.g.
you don’t program your VCR anymore
e.g.
you don’t search your yellow pages book anymore
e.g.
you shop from home on a daily basis
e.g.
you often work from home now.
e.g.

Wasabi : music composition & analysis on the Web
[Buffa et al.]

Tim Berners-Lee
2014
we are not analysing a world,
we are building it. We are not
experimental philosophers, we
are philosophical engineers. (…)
when we design Web protocols,
we actually get a chance to
define and create the way a new
world works.

At the beginning, before the Web arrived, the problem
was to imagine a world with the Web in it
We are now in the inverse situation where people have
forgotten or can no longer imagine a world without the
Web.
The Web is now so common that it provides metaphors
for other fields, e.g. the mycorrhizal networks is called
the Wood-Wide Web by some biologists.

the World We Want?
or why the possible futures of the Web concern us all?

enforce, by design, the Web we want?
what Web Do We Want?
shaping a Web we want requires changes
that are not only technical but also, legal,
political, economic, ecological, etc.
what World do we want?
inversely, we established that the
changes we make to the Web will have a
world-wide impact.

a guideline
to design the new
face of the Web
“As for the future, your task is
not to foresee it but to enable it.”
– Antoine de Saint‐Exupery

a universal space to connect a variety of forms of intelligence
to augment human intelligence more
than to develop fully autonomous
artificial intelligence
target augmented intelligence
hybrid approaches to displace or
complement some aspects of the Web.
For example, decentralized approaches
chosen Web hybrids
to monitor and preserve certain
characteristics of the Web, studying,
monitoring and reporting on its activity
and targeting problems
Web-dedicated AI
policies and values important to the Web
(e.g. seek decentralization, equality of
access) calling for a philosophical study
philosophy of the Web

Autonomy AgentWare Web Researcher, 1996

“A wider landscape of governance and regulation will be required in
order to support the future Web. (…) We propose that the concept of
‘internet governance’ (…) should be expanded to ‘Web governance’
as the field of practice through which we can shape the future of the
Web. (…) This will only be effective if developed through global
collaboration and enforcement.” [Manifesto]
Continuously identifying the
potentials of the Web and leading it
to desired ones requires a global
effort and construct we don’t have
and we need to imagine.
WEB GOVERNANCE

two cross-cutting activities to be systematically
and globally implemented for the Web
Research: Web science
an interdisciplinary field studying the Web both as an
architecture and as a large-scale socio-technical system
that emerges from it, to understand and imagine the Web
and its future
Literacy: Web education
the Web must absolutely become a clearly identified
subject for education to train and empower the current and
future users of the Web

If in the world we want, the long‐term potential of the Web is to augment and link
all forms of intelligence then we need an interdisciplinary collaboration to prepare
and plan for a time when we will be “All Watched Over by a Web of Loving Grace”

Where
We
Went
Bettina Berendt, Fabien Gandon,
Susan Halford, Wendy Hall, Jim
Hendler, Katharina E Kinder-
Kurlanda, Eirini Ntoutsi, Steffen
Staab. Web Futures: Inclusive,
Intelligent, Sustainable The
2020 Manifesto for Web
Science. Dagstuhl Manifestos,
2021. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-
03189474
Fabien Gandon. Web Science,
Artificial Intelligence and
Intelligence Augmentation (in
Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop
18262 - 10 Years of Web Science:
Closing The Loop), Dagstuhl,
2019. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-
0197676 8
Fabien Gandon, Wendy Hall. A
Never-Ending Project for
Humanity Called "the Web".
WWW 2022 - ACM Web
Conference, Apr 2022, Lyon,
France. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-
03633526
Fabien Gandon. For everything:
Tim Berners-Lee, winner of the
2016 Turing award for having
invented… the Web. 1024 :
Bulletin de la Société
Informatique de France, 2017, 11,
pp.21. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-
01843967
Fabien Gandon. The three 'W' of
the World Wide Web call for the
three 'M' of a Massively
Multidisciplinary Methodology.
WEBIST 2014 - 10th International
Conference, Apr 2014, Barcelona,
Spain. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-
01223236
Fabien Gandon. The Web We
Mix: Benevolent AIs for a
Resilient Web. WebSci ’19, Jun
2019, Boston, United States.
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02148911
Fabien Gandon. A Survey of the
First 20 Years of Research on
Semantic Web and Linked Data.
Revue des Sciences et
Technologies de l'Information -
Série ISI : Ingénierie des
Systèmes d'Information, 2018,
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01935898
Fabien Gandon
http://fabien.info
@fabien_gandon

Walking Our Way to the Web

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