Introduction Information Technology New Information Spaces Social

Notebooks of the Fundación General CSIC / Nº 7 / December 2011 / Published quarterly / Price: 9 euros |||||||||||||||||||| Notebooks of the Fundación General CSIC / December 2011 4 12 40 62 Introduction Information New information Social Technology spaces impacts 07 LYCHNOS Notebooks of the Fundación General CSIC Nº 7 DECEMBER 2011 Executive Editor Reyes Sequera Assistant Editor Sira Laguna Page layouts DiScript Preimpresión, S. L. Illustration Lola Gómez Redondo Translation Duncan Gilson Published by President Rafael Rodrigo Montero Director Javier Rey Campos Address Príncipe de Vergara, nº 9 - 2ª derecha; Madrid 28001 www.fgcsic.es © Fundación General CSIC, 2011. All rights reserved. Use by third parties of the contents of this journal without the prior written consent of the copyright holder may constitute a criminal offence under intellectual property law. Printed by: DiScript Preimpresion, S. L. Legal Deposit: M-33022-2010. ISSN: 2172-0207 CONTENTS LYCHNOS Nº 7 DECEMBER 2011 01 Introduction ...................................................................................................... 4 Information Technology. Jesús Marco de Lucas ...................................................... 6 02 Information Technology ............................................................................... 12 02.1 Artificial Intelligence. Vicenç Torra ................................................................... 14 02.2 Scientific computing infrastructure. Isabel Campos ......................................... 20 02.3 Ten years of building a semantic web. Marco Schorlemmer ............................ 26 02.4 Cryptography: if it didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. Gonzalo Álvarez .... 33 03 New information spaces ............................................................................. 40 03.1 Time for new models for the communication and dissemination of science. 03.4 Agnès Ponsati and Isabel Bernal .................................................................... 42 03.2 The digital contribution to the world of encyclopaedias. 03.4 José Antonio Millán ........................................................................................ 50 03.3 The Future Internet and R&D. Tomás de Miguel .............................................. 55 04 Social impacts of Information Technology .......................................... 62 04.1 The cultural changes being driven by social software. 03.4 José Luis Molina ............................................................................................. 64 04.2 Reinventing social practices on the Net. 03.4 Antonio Rodríguez de las Heras ...................................................................... 70 04.3 Mobile phones, maps, satellites and social networks: crisis management 2.0. 03.4 Marta Poblet ................................................................................................... 75 05 Forum ................................................................................................................. 80 06 News ................................................................................................................... 84 Notebooks of the Fundación General CSIC | Nº 6 | LYCHNOS | 3 01 Introduction 01 INTRODUCTION ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Information Technology “Information technology (IT) is concerned with [...] the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications”. This definition, which dates back to 1958 and which Wikipedia reproduces in its article on “Information Technology” is as good a starting point as any from which to look at how the field has developed. Jesús Marco de Lucas Instituto de Física de Cantabria (CSIC and Universidad de Cantabria) he story of IT (informa- ing a particularly fruitful period of microelectronics, made ials, photolithography, and tion technology) is, first of direct collaboration possible by another major electron microscopy. and foremost, the story between mathematicians, technological and scientific T of a technological revolution physicists and engineers, advance –the development of The exponential growth of which has had a huge eco- involving geniuses such as the transistor and integrated IT nomic and social impact and John von Neumann, Alan Tur- circuit technology– that made Computers are the basic drawn upon numerous contri- ing and Claude Shannon, who the IT revolution possible. And building blocks of any infor- butions from science. But it is together laid the foundations its incredible growth was mation system, and their not the story of a scientific for Information Theory and helped along by a multitude of power depends fundamentally revolution. In fact, most of IT’s Computer Science. But, as other concurrent advances, on the ability of their (micro) key concepts were conceived Wikipedia’s definition sug- such as the development of processor to execute internal between 1940 and 1960, dur- gests, it was the emergence laser technology, new mater- operations. These operations 6 | LYCHNOS | Nº 7 | Notebooks of the Fundación General CSIC ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| INTRODUCTION 01 Jesús Marco de Lucas Jesús Marco de Lucas is a research professor at the Cantabria Physics Institute, a joint centre belonging to the CSIC and the University of Cantabria. He has a doctorate from the University of Cantabria, having written his thesis on high energy experimental physics, while working on the DELPHI experiment on the LEP (Large Electron Positron Collider) accelerator at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. At CERN he coordinated the experiment’s group searching for the Higgs boson, and was involved in combining the results of the LEP, which set the current lower limit for its mass at approximately 120 times that of a proton. With the initial goal of addressing the computing needs of experiments at the next CERN accelerator, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), he took part in setting up LHC Grid Computing, an international network of computers for scientific use, using “grid” technology. He also took part in the creation of the e-Science network in Spain, which is open to all research areas, and of the European grid infrastructure, EGI.eu, which currently processes over a million jobs a day in 50 countries, using more than 300,000 coordinated processors, and with a capacity of 100 million gigabytes (100 petabytes). He also coordinated the Interactive European Grid project, which developed tools allowing this infrastructure to be used interactively and execute parallel supercomputing applications. He has held various management positions in the CSIC, including the post of director of the Cantabria Physics Institute from 2004 to 2007, and coordinator of the Physical Science and Technologies Area from 2008 to 2010. Jesús Marco de Lucas. are defined by the program after an Intel executive who the course of 40 years (220 = have also improved exponen- code the processor is execut- suggested that calculating 1,048,576). tially. They have gone from ing, and revolve around power would continue double being able to send hundreds manipulating data held in approximately every two years The increase in computing of bits (basic units of informa- memory. The processing thanks to reductions in tran- power has also been driven tion) per second over parallel speed is set by the frequency sistor size and increasing by the creation of supercom- cables in 1970, to transmitting of the processor’s internal clock speeds. The first micro- puters, which combine the hundreds of millions of bits clock, which defines its processor, the Intel 4004 power of up to a hundred per second over optical fibres “cycle.” Processing power launched in 1971, had a clock thousand processors in a sin- today. Again the jump has also depends on the number frequency of 740 kHz and gle system. This approach been of the order of a million and complexity of the internal consisted of around 2,300 allows computing powers of over the last 40 years. operations it is able to com- transistors. One of today’s the order of petaflops (trillions plete in each cycle, and the processors includes over a of operations a second) to be The ability to store information amount of data the computer billion transistors on a 2 cm2 achieved using processors has also experienced expo- is able to process at a time, all chip and can run at speeds of able to perform hundreds of nential growth: magnetic of which basically depends on up to 5 GHz (million kHz). gigaflops (hundreds of millions discs have gone from typical the number of transistors on Computing power has grown of operations a second). storage capacities of 2-3 the chip. Since 1970 proces- exponentially, doubling every megabytes or million charac- sor power has grown in line two years, which means it has Similarly, communications (i.e. ters (bytes) in 1971 to 3 tera- with a prediction known as increased a million-fold over the ability to transmit data bytes (3 million megabytes) in Moore’s law, which is named from one system to another) 2011. Notebooks of the Fundación General CSIC

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