Beyond the scope of the Cyber Physical Systems, the Cyber Physical Society concerns not only the cyber space and the physical space but also humans, knowledge, society and culture. It is a future interconnection environment that connects nature, cyber space and society under certain rules. Research on Cyber Physical Society will lead to the extension of information science and technology.

In 2002, the notion of knowledge flow was proposed for connecting humans, minds, and knowledge transmission devices as well as controlling the process of knowledge sharing processes: "Knowledge flow is invisible, but it works with any cooperative team no matter whether people intentionally make use of it or not. We can imagine the following scenario of the knowledge flow working with a cooperative team. Team members are linked with various types of 'knowledge transmission belts' like the production line. Any team member can put knowledge onto a proper belt, which then automatically conveys the knowledge to the team member who requires it. Any team member can get the required knowledge from the ¡°transmission belt¡± linked to him when performing his task. These ¡°transmission belts¡± together with the team members constitute a knowledge flow network. People can raise the effectiveness of teamwork by properly designing the network and controlling its execution process." [14] This is the early description of the ideal of the Cyber Physical Society. We still do not know in-depth about the 'knowledge transmission belts', its form, mechanism and principle. "Human cognition and work processes are two inseparable parts of human problem solving, however, the cognitive process is neglected in most research on knowledge-intensive team Cooperation." [13] An approach for modeling these two parts of the process for use by a distributed co-operative team was proposed in 2003. The relation between knowledge flow network in mental space and the citation network in artifact space was further studied in 2005: "The knowledge flow network implicit in the citation network consists of knowledge flows between nodes that process knowledge, including reasoning, fusing, generalizing, inventing, and problem solving, by authors and co-authors." [7]

In 2003, virus in physical space, virus in cyber space, the Web, individual, society, and ecosystem health were linked in the background of fighting epidemics [12]. The authors pointed out: "Connecting nationwide systems through the Internet could create a worldwide eco-environment management service system that would help with collaborative monitoring, simulation, research, management, and control of epidemic situations. Such a system should include globally distributed resources--devices, information, knowledge, and services--that could dynamically and intelligently collaborate to provide effective just-in-time services on demand to help manage an emerging crisis." This ideal is in line with the notions of Web of Things or Internet of Things. In 2005, the effort to connect epidemic network in physical space and the cyber systems was made by Zhuge: "rules of bio-epidemic and e-epidemic inspire scientists to create a live, scalable interconnected environment for effectively managing situations in nature, society, and the digital virtual world." He also pointed out that "Various sensors and sensor networks, mobile digital devices, and robots extend the Internet to a pervasive interconnection environment, which can automatically monitor and collect societal information to form an ideal environment for simulation." [8]

In 2004, the ideal of a harmoniously evolved interconnection environment Eco-Grid from ecosystem point of view was proposed in [10]: "Designed as a complex ecosystem, it balances the competing interests of its numerous species as its social, economic and technological environments evolve." "An Eco-Grid is an open worldwide interconnection environment reflecting the characteristics of natural ecological environments. Its versatile resources and social roles coexist harmoniously yet evolve, provide appropriate on-demand services to one another, are transformed from one form to another, and communicate in terms of information, knowledge, and service flows through social and economic value chains. It maintains a reasonable rate of expansion of useful resources and assimilates waste resources in light of overall environment capacity."

In 2004, The Knowledge Grid pointed out in Chaper 1 "The Knowledge Grid Methodology" [11]: "Modern communication facilitates like the Internet provide people with unprecedented social opportunities for knowledge generation and sharing. However, our increasing computing power and communication bandwidth does not of itself improve this knowledge generation and sharing. To do this, the semantic ability of the facilities that transmit and store knowledge must be improved. Improving our social interaction in this way would help enrich knowledge in our society by supporting social activities at different levels (both the physical and the mental level) and in different environment spaces" and "The Knowledge Grid is a virtual socio grid, where people enjoy and provide services through versatile flow cycles like control flows, material flows, energy flows, information flows and knowledge flows". The methodology is also a valuable reference when developing the Cyber Physical Society.

In 2005, the ideal of the future interconnection environment that connects the nature, society and cyber world was proposed in [9]. Zhuge emphasized the importance of harmonious development of the nature, society, environment and cyber world: "Networks pervade nature, society, and virtual worlds, giving structure and function to a variety of resources and behaviors. Discovering the rules that govern the future interconnection environment is a major challenge." A set of parameters of the future interconnection environment was proposed. "As Figure 1 shows, the future interconnection environment will be a large-scale human-machine environment that unites three worlds:

• Physical World---nature, natural and artificial materials, physical devices, and networks;
• Virtual World---the perceptual environment constructed mainly through vision (text, images, color, graphs, and so on) and hearing, and to some extent touch, smell, and taste; and
• Mental World---ideals, religions, morals, culture, arts, wisdom, and scientific knowledge, which all spring from thought, emotion, creativity, and imagination.

Ideally, this environment will be an autonomous, living, sustainable, and intelligent system within which society and nature evolve cooperatively. It will gather and organize resources into semantically rich forms that both machines and people can easily use. Geographically dispersed users will cooperatively accomplish tasks andsolve problems by using the network to actively promote the flow of material, energy, techniques, information, knowledge, and services in this environment."

In 2008, Zhuge proposed the viewpoint that the study of semantics should be carried out in four worlds: real world, mental world, machine world and document world, and studied the mapping and integration between Resource Space Model, OWL and Database [6].

In 2009, he used the term Cyber-Society to represent the ideal of the future interconnection environment. Exploring the ideal he proposed the notion of Interactive Semantics in Artificial Intelligence Journal as interaction is the most basic behavior in the future Cyber Society. The classification based Resource Space Model and the link based Semantic Link Network were integrated to reflect the semantic image. He presented invited talks on Interactive Semantics in the University of Waterloo and the University of Victoria in 2009. Approaches to discover semantic communities and emerging semantics in semantic link network were proposed in this year.

In April of 2010, he used the term Cyber Physical Society to represent the ideal of future interconnection environment in IEEE AINA2010 Keynote in Australia [4]. In his keynote, a Socio-Natural Thought Semantic Link Network is proposed as the method for semantic networking in the Cyber Physical Society. His keynote passed through relations insociety, linked models in cyber space, laws of networking, dynamicity, and application in archeology. He pointed out "Humans have intelligence to observe and participate in social processes, to think, and to know the effect of establishing a relation. Humans can also actively select appropriate relations and persons according to requirement, situation and social rules. Machines are obviously limited in these abilities. Various graph-based models have been used to connect resources in the cyber space. Two issues are fundamental: (1) machines know little relation in human society and the nature, data structures in machines are for machines to process not for humans to read, so it is not realistic to expect machines to discover social and natural laws and resolve relevant issues without human instruction; and, (2) machines are hard to know the effect of establishing and making use of relations, and to explain computing result according to society and nature. The cause is that machines do not have any worldview. Connecting various networks and machines with nature, society, and even human minds can create a new world where individuals have semantic images that can enhance mutual understanding."

Also in April of 2010, he proposed the notion of Cyber Physical Socio Ecology as a new effort to cross disciplines [1].

CPSocio-SLN is a model and method for semantic networking in the natural physical space, cyber space, social space, and mental space in the Cyber Physical Society. It more focuses on diversity, dynamicity and evolution. Viewing CPSocio-SLN as an evolution process through a series of operations, we investigated its basic operations, completeness and dynamicity before April 2010 [2].

[1] X.Shi and H.Zhuge, Cyber Physical Socio Ecology, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, accepted.

[2] H.Zhuge and B. Xu, Basic Operations, Completeness and Dynamicity of Cyber Physical Socio Semantic Link Network CPSocio-SLN, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, accepted.

[3] H.Zhuge, Interactive Semantics, Artificial Intelligence, 174(2010)190-204.

[4] H.Zhuge, Socio-Natural Thought Semantic Link Network: A Method of Semantic Networking in the Cyber Physical Society, Keynote at IEEE AINA 2010, Perth, Australia, 20-23 April 2010, pp.19-26.

[5] H.Zhuge, Communities and Emerging Semantics in Semantic Link Network: Discovery and Learning, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol.21, no.6, 2009, pp. 785-799.

[6] H.Zhuge, Y.Xing and P.Shi, Basic Operations, Resource Space Model, OWL and Database: Mapping and Integration, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 8/4, 2008.

[7] H.Zhuge, Discovery of Knowledge Flow in Science, Communications of the ACM, 49 (5) (2006) 101-107.

[8] H.Zhuge, Exploring an Epidemic in an E-Science Environment, Communications of the ACM, 48 (9) (2005) 109-114.

[9] H.Zhuge, The Future Interconnection Environment, IEEE Computer, 38 (4) (2005) 27-33.

[10] H.Zhuge and X. Shi, Toward the Eco-grid: A Harmoniously Evolved Interconnection Environment. Communications of the ACM, 47(9)(2004)78-83.

[11] H.Zhuge, The Knowledge Grid, World Scientific, 2004, 2010 (2nd edition).

[12] H.Zhuge and X.Shi, Fighting epidemics in the information and knowledge age, IEEE Computer, Oct, 2003, pp.114-116.

[13] H.Zhuge, Workflow-and agent-based cognitive flow management for distributed team cooperation, Information and Management, 5(40)(2003)419-429.

[14] H.Zhuge, A knowledge flow model for peer-to-peer team knowledge sharing and management, Expert Systems with Applications, 23(1)(2002)23-30.

Web of Things is a vision inspired from the Internet of Things where everyday devices and objects that contain embedded devices or computers are connected by the Web.

A Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a system featuring a tight combination of, and coordination between, computational and physical elements. There are many cyber physical sytems already in use.