Seminars will be held in the Lecture Theatre 1 - William Gates Building, Computer Laboratory at 4.15pm

	See also: Networks & OS seminars Security seminars Logic and Semantics seminars Additional meetings weekly timetable for other meetings

Martin Dodge

What is the best way to map the Internet?

My talk will look at the ways people have tried to map the Internet over the last thirty years or so. A huge number of different maps have been produced, with very diverse forms and functions, ranging from simple geographic plans of cable routes to complex real-time 3D visualisations. They have been produced for a number of distinct purposes from planning network deployment, operational management, to prove academic theories, as grad student projects, for market research, for monitoring public policy, for policing and intelligence gathering. And, of course, many have been motivated to map the Internet for no better reason than because it is there! There are many different aspects of the Internet that have been mapped from physical infrastructures, logical layers and protocols, traffic flows, user demographics. The maps cover a range of different scales from LANs up to global scale. Many of these maps are beautiful and many more are really rather ugly. A few are actually quite useful, but many more are not very helpful at all. However, all the maps provide a fascinating picture of what the Internet looks like, or rather they provide fascinating insights into what people think the Internet should look like. I will review a number of the most interesting and useful maps and attempt to answer the question, what is the best way to map the Internet.