A Coordinated View of Cyberspace

Abstract: Cyberspace is an online world created by growing network of computing and communication technologies. It is a virtual space of the Internet, paralleled to geographic space we are living on. As becoming a recognized component of our society, cyberspace gradually draws more attention in academic research. Many prior efforts have tried to represent and visualize cyberspace in geographic coordinate system (GCS) and network coordinate system (NCS). However, there are some disadvantages on these views. Firstly, mapping cyberspace in geographic space only reveals a partial characteristics of cyberspace, especially geographic characteristic of cyberspace. All what we could see is only the geographic information of cyberspace and tip of the iceberg of cyberspace. Secondly, NCS is established according to network topology and maps the position of each node in the coordinate system according to RTT (Round Trip Time) or network delays. However, this coordinate system changes dynamically with RTT changes or host connection status, resulting in the coordinate system not stable. Cyberspace, regarded as a second space in human life, is rather complex and multi-dimension. However, it is little known to us. It is in a great need of establishing its own coordinate system to tackle the challenging task of efficiently visualizing complex multi-dimensional cyberspace and get to know more about cyberspace. This paper aims to explore and visualize cyberspace. To best of our knowledge, we are firstly to establish a Cyberspace Coordination System (CyberCS) to represent and visualize cyberspace. CyberCS will make the representation of cyberspace easier or more concrete which is similar to Fourier transform. With the help of CyberCS, different parts and degrees of cyberspace are efficiently visualized and user can easily filter out the specific details of interest.