Coordinating Webs of Information

More from Jon Udell...

On today's Web, security, asynchrony, reliability, routing, and proxying are, in general, aspects of the data communications layer. On tomorrow's Web they'll be aspects of the application layer, and we'll operate more like weavers of business processes than plumbers of networks.

I'm not sure I understand this vision, but I'm also not sure I agree with my understanding of it.

The best way to build a web of information and processing appears to go back to blackboard architectures in the 1970's. These ideas also proved to be agile for a more broad set of coordination problems. Today's web is showing an approach along these lines may be effective at scaling to the world for machine-machine as well as human-machine.

I thoroughly doubt "we'll operate more like weavers of business processes than plumbers of networks". We need to hide business processes as much as possible, favoring coordination via semi-structured data showing up here and there on flexible networks of cooperating-yet-arms-length processes.