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Semantic Spacetime and Data Analytics(Part 12)

Appendix 1: Exploring the digital barrier reef with CAIDA and ArangoDB

We probably think we know the Internet, but how many can really say they understand how it works? What do you think of when you hear the word? Your favourite websites? Social media? Perhaps the WiFi router supplied by your service provider. Understanding all its moving parts is not for the faint-hearted, yet a few researchers do this for a living (if you call that living!). Like all research, there are both ambiguities and controversies involved, so we're always looking for a new approach. A Semantic Spacetime approach presents new opportunities to unravel those issues, enabled by the new hybrid database technologies for document-graph representation. In this Appendix to the main series, I want to showcase an application of SST to Internet data analytics.

The Internet isn’t so much a web as it is a “living network” — a busy ecosystem of ongoing processes, all of which are connected together to form a large cooperative graph. The graph might appear straightforward, as any snapshot of something in time seems to be, but we shouldn’t mistake a snapshot for the real thing.




Figure 1: A local sample of Internet structure from CAIDA data.


Understanding the Internet takes a lot more than collecting and mapping out the names of websites, domains, IP addresses, or even seeing the phys