Future Interconnection Environment – Dream, Principle, Challenge and Practice

Abstract

Networks and flows are everywhere in society, nature and virtual world organizing versatile resources and behaviors. Breaking boundaries, this keynote establishes a scenario of the future interconnection environment – a large-scale, autonomous, live, sustainable and intelligent network environment where society, nature, and the environment harmoniously co-exist, cooperatively work and evolve. It automatically senses and collects useful information from the nature, transforms raw information into resources in the environment, and organizes resources in semantic rich normal forms that can be easily understood by both machine and human. Geographically dispersed people and resources can work in cooperation to accomplish tasks and solve problems by actively participating material flows, energy flows, technology flows, information flows, knowledge flows and service flows in the environment through roles and machines, improving the environment and the nature. Parameters, characteristics and principles of the environment are proposed from the system methodology point of view. A case study on a live semantic link network under a reference model of the environment is presented. As a practice, the advanced architecture and technology used in China Knowledge Grid e-science environment IMAGINE-1 is introduced.