5. Conclusion

We have described a complete, step-by-step, procedure for the vizualization of the complexity and morphogenesis of the World Wide Web. The implementation of this procedure, our next goal, aims at the installation of a website in which, like a weather report, the current web image, and movies of earlier web images, are available for browsing. The stages of this implementation, in review, are: obtain connection matrix data for domains *.org, *.edu from a web crawler transform to a matrix of pointwise fractal dimension reduce by pixel averaging post as GIF images on the web We see this as a relatively simple program, the first step being the most difficult. For this first step we see two options: one is to write our own web crawler, the other is to enter into partnership with one of the existing WWW-index services, such as: Alta Vista, Yahoo, Excite, etc.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my class, Webology, at the university of California at Santa Cruz, Spring 1996, for the opportunity of testing these ideas on an unsympathetic audience, and to Don Foresta of the University of Paris for suggesting this idea in the first place. In a joint research project currently under way, we hope to actually carry out the fractal dimension strategy, presenting our results on the WWW at http://www.vismath.org/webometry. Many thanks to the London School of Economics and the University of Paris for grants making this research possible, and to the Istituto di Scienze Economiche of the University of Urbino for hospitality during the writing of this paper.

Bibliography

Abraham, Fred D., Dynamical modeling and research of collective cognition, J. World Futures, to appear

Abraham, Ralph H., Complex dynamics, Santa Cruz, CA: Aerial Press,1991.

Abraham, Ralph H., Frank Jas, and Willard Russell, The Web Empowerment Book, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995.

Chaisson, Eric, The Life Era, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987.

Farmer, J. Doyne, E. Ott, and J. Yorke, Fractal dimension, Physica D, 7 (1983), p. 153,

Grossberg, Stephen, and Michael Kuperstein, Neural Dynamics of Adaptive Sensory-motor Control, New York: Pergamon Press, 1989.

Laszlo, Ervin, Evolution: the Grand Synthesis, Boston: New Science Library, 1987.

Mandelbrot, Benoit, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, New York: W. H. Freeman, 1877/1982.

Russell, Peter, The Global Brain, Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1983.

Sheldrake, Rupert, A New Science of Life, London: Blond and Briggs, 1981.