DOT's SPACE

During our recent PSIRP workshop at the beginning of June, we took the time to insert an invited presentation by Pekka Nikander and myself at Budapest University (organized by Ericsson Hungary on June 2nd) on the topic of Future Internet. This is certainly a wide topic and we both tried to capture interesting angles on this issue.

You can find my presentation here. It is a mixture of a call for re-thinking fundamentals (clean-slate design), tussle networking and the work done in the Communications Futures Program at MIT on value chain dynamics. I hope that you find it interesting and stimulating.

Unfortunately, I cannot make Pekka’s slides available but drop him an email in case you are interested (or drop me one, I can ask him) – they’re definitely worthwhile checking out!

As I have written before, PSIRP (an EU FP7 project of small scale) started in January this year. While we are heading towards the deliverables of this project, we also underwent an internal exercise to create and formulate a clear vision for what we are aiming at, something that is bigger than what we’re actually doing but something that gives our work a clear frame.

As no surprise to me, we adopted the tussle networking vision, which I have presented earlier on this blog, as our vision in PSIRP with a clearly formulated scope for our project (embedded in this larger vision). The information provisioning plane, presented in this vision, clearly maps onto the work we intend to perform in PSIRP. Surely, many pieces, in particular in the space of Semantic Web and tussle delimination, are largely missing in our work scope but we can already see how some of these ideas also emerge in our architectural work (more on this in later blogs).

Besides the vision aspect however, this exercise also served the purpose of engaging internal project members into the overall story, embedding them into the picture (or at least attempt to do so). For that reason, the actual vision is accompanied by a set of scenarios, which was collectively created and pressed into a storyline that describes the life of fictious John and Mary (and their family).

I am happy to say that the overall (internal) goal of engaging the project members seemed to have been achieved. We collected a set of scenarios across different types of services and experiences from quite many project members. All of these scenarios are presented in a way that, apart from the actual storyline (I took the liberty to change the original contributions towards a somewhat coherent lifestory), each scenario outlines the background as well as the essence of the scenario in relation to our vision of an information-centric Internet.

As said, the vision and scenarios document is not an official deliverable of our project, it is a technical report created outside our agreed obligations. I expect PSIRP to create other such technical reports, touching on issues we identify in this effort that we either did not foresee upfront (in the end, this is explorative research!) or did not want to commit to strongly in form of a deliverable. The vision and scenarios document is a public document, as almost all of our deliverables are. It can be read by anyone and it is intended to be distributed. So please feel free to do so (read and distribute – possibly even comment here). You can find the document for download here and it will also be available on the PSIRP project website soon.

End of March, I visited the Internet of Things 2008 conference in Zurich. The conference was an interesting mix of business and research people, discussing the Internet of Things around RFID and beyond.

I was invited to talk about the challenges ahead for the Internet at large, driven by the increasing cross-value chain collaboration that is driven forward not only but in particular by RFID.

In this talk, I tried to make the point that the discussion around Internet of Things, Internet of Services, and Internet of whatever is counterproductive and an indication of today’s still prevailing ignorance and inability to consider the Internet as a large-scale system that requires system solutions. I put forward a suggestion for overcoming this silo-ed thinking through an architectural vision called tussle networking, which has been presented earlier in this blog. This vision envisages a collaborative environment in which concerns of participants are captured (through intelligent methods found in, e.g., context awareness) and expressed through explicit policies, executed by a system centered around information, its provisioning, representation and reasoning over.

It was certainly a different view in this conference, creating interesting debate at the end of the presentation. You can find the slides of my presentation here.

WordPress has finally been updated! Now it’s back to blogging.

More soon…