WWW in the small - Towards sustainable adaptivity

The web technology is increasingly used by communities of various kinds to support their memory and the interactions among their members. In these cases the WWW can be viewed as a web of local spaces (Web in the small), each characterized by local structure and semantics. The local space can be used to provide the community members with adaptive functionalities to enhance their navigations and to promote new forms of interaction among them. The realization and management of these functionalities are sustainable since they do not require more knowledge and effort than the ones the community generates and spends to survive. The paper presents a technology, the LAW system, which is a step towards a view of the Web in the small and complements more traditional technologies supporting the current acceptation of the World Wide Web (Web in the large). The LAW system is informed by an agent based model where space and its topology are first class concepts.