Open-Ended Evolution and a Mechanism of Novelties in Web Services

Web services are analogous to living ecosystems in nature, in that they form an artificial ecosystem consisting of many tags and their associated media, such as photographs, movies, and web pages created by human users. In biological ecosystems, we view a tag as a species and a human as a hidden environmental resource. Our study examines the evolution of web services, in particular social tagging systems, with respect to the self-organization of new tags. The evolution of new combinations of tags is analyzed as an open-ended evolution (OEE) index. Tag meaning is computed by types of associated tags, including tags that vary their meanings temporally, which, we argue, are examples of OEE.