The web from a complex adaptive systems perspective

The Web continues to grow at a phenomenal rate and the amount of information on the Web is overwhelming. Finding the relevant information remains a big challenge. Due to its wide distribution, its openness and high dynamics, the WWW is a complex system, for which we have to imagine mechanisms of content maintaining, filtering and organizing that are able to deal with its evolving, dynamics and distribution. Integrating mechanisms of self-organization of the Web content is an attractive perspective, to match with these requirements. This paper explores the Web from a complex adaptive system (CAS) perspective. It reviews some characteristic behaviours of CAS and shows how the Web exhibits similar behaviours. We illustrate with a model for Web content organization adopting the CAS vision and using the multi-agent paradigm.