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-
- Wednesday, 21 September 1994 2:09:49 PM CN CyberCulture Item From:
- Michael Ney Subject: Publishing on WWW To: CN CyberCulture
- Attachments: Guide-to-Australia.gif 16K Network
- Publishing and the World Wide Web
-
- by David G. Green, Supercomputer Facility, Australian National University
-
- Email: david.green@anu.edu.au
-
- Note: The attached file is a GIF of Figure 4 referenced inside the essay.
-
- An information explosion is underway on computer networks around the globe.
- Stimulated by powerful new protocols, especially the World Wide Web (WWW), the
- volume and variety of on-line information is growing at an exponential rate. The
- first group to feel the effects of the information explosion are academics,
- especially scientists.
-
- In just a few months WWW has already begun an upheaval in traditional scientific
- institutions, such as journals. It has been exciting to watch this revolution as
- it unfolds and, as manager of an active Web site, to play a part in this historic
- process. Here I draw on my experiences as a site manager to describe the Web and
- some of its implications.
-
- The Web The World Wide Web (WWW) originated at CERN in Switzerland. The
- underlying HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) deals chiefly with hypertext
- documents, but also handles multimedia information (hence the term "hypermedia").
-
- Web documents are formatted using the "Hypertext Markup Language" (HTML), which
- has roots in NROFF/TROFF and is an application of the Standard Generalized Markup
- Language (SGML). Hypertext links appear as highlighted terms or images that are
- embedded directly within the text.
-
- The Web really took off early in 1993 when the US National Centre for
- Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) released a browser ("Mosaic") that demonstrated
- the protocol's full potential. This program (now available for most computing
- platforms) sparked an amazing 334,000% growth in Web activity during 1993.
- Perhaps the most telling features of Mosaic are that it makes true "electronic
- publishing" possible and that it permits the seamless integration of material
- from many different sites (including a user's own local data). WWW browsers
- (notably Mosaic) are now available for most of the commonly used computing
- platforms. Tools for WYSIWYG editing of HTML documents are also appearing. (See
- Figure 1 - Title page for the first issue of the hypermedia journal Complexity
- International, published on the author's Web server.)
-
- Development of HTTP servers has parallelled the above advances in Web client
- software. For example, NCSA's client/server software now includes:
-
- a forms interface that allows users to interact with documents that are displayed
- as forms (including buttons, menus, dialog boxes) and that pass complex queries
- back to the server. a map interface that allows users to query a map
- interactively. For instance to query my index of Australian web sites, users
- point and click on a map to obtain lists of servers based in each city. (See
- Figure 2 - The World Wide Web's "Virtual Tourist" page. This interactive map
- provides point-and-click information about many parts of the globe. It is the
- collaborative product of hundreds of site managers around the world.) an
- authorization feature that provides various types of security, such as
- restricting access to particular information or requesting passwords. an SQL(
- structured query language) gateway that allows servers to pass queries to
- databases. Such gateways are already implemented for many databases (e.g.
- Australian plants, DNA sequences). an access log that allows managers to monitor
- patterns of usage.
-
- An Australian bioinformatics server As a GIS manager for the Australian
- government I experienced first hand the enormous human problems that plague the
- development of proprietary databases. I also became aware of a "serendipity
- effect" whereby combining different datasets inevitably leads to new and
- unexpected discoveries. On returning to university research I was therefore
- impressed by the success of public domain databases in molecular biology (e.g.
- Genbank, EMBL). Operating on the Internet, these bioinformatics projects not only
- promote collaboration on a truly vast scale, but also enrich research by making
- entirely new kinds of studies possible. I therefore began exploring methods of
- compiling and delivering scientific information via the Internet with the aim of
- creating a network platform for collaborative projects.
-
- In October 1992 I opened an experimental "bioinformatics" network server from the
- Australian National University's Research School of Biological Sciences. The
- Sparc 2 server (life.anu.edu.au) initially provided access via the FTP and Gopher
- protocols. A listserver and World Wide Web server (URL="http://life.anu.edu.au/")
- following soon after.
-
- Annoyed by the barrenness of most Web and Gopher servers at the time (which
- usually just held promotional material), I was determined to provide real
- scientific information. I began by collating links to the most useful sources of
- information I could find and began hounding colleagues to provide preprints, data
- and software. Organizing this material under a number of themes (e.g.
- biodiversity, complex systems, molecular biology, weather) I created a "virtual
- library" that soon attracted a large following. By the end of 1993 "life" was
- delivering over 5000 files daily to users all over the world (less than 20% of
- users are within Australia). (See Figure 3 - Home page for the Author's WWW
- server as viewed by NCSA Mosaic.)
-
- The most satisfying achievement is that the example provided by my server
- convinced colleagues in other institutions (e.g. the Australian National Botanic
- Gardens, Environmental Resources information Network, Tasmanian Parks and
- Wildlife Service) to set up their own servers and as they in turn have convinced
- others (e.g. Bureau of Meteorology). As a result of contributions by all of these
- groups, Australia now has the most comprehensive on-line environmental
- information services in the world.
-
- SINS of the Internet Having opened a server ahead of the "rush", it has been easy
- to chalk up a long string of "firsts": Australia's first registered Web server,
- Australia's first on-line environmental information service, world's first Web
- pages on medicine, molecular biology, biodiversity, and so on. The sense of
- exploring new territory is strong and I have been acutely aware of developing
- trends and possibilities.
-
- Network publishing is the most obvious activity made possible by the Web. The
- Web's ability to "deliver" published material to its intended audience is
- startling - my most widely read publication is a conference paper that I placed
- on-line as an experiment! A growing number of hypertext books are now appearing
- on-line. Meanwhile some foresighted publishers are beginning to combine "free"
- information services with on-line marketing. On-line preprint services have been
- around for several years, especially in Physics. Now, however, the journals
- themselves are starting to go on-line too. Late in 1993 Terry Bossomaier and I
- opened a hypermedia journal (Complexity International). Despite the many
- publishing features of the Web this exercise posed formidable technical
- challenges, such as how to present equations.
-
- The Web also makes possible entirely new kinds of publication. For instance, by
- organizing pointers to many different servers Jim Croft and I created the Guide
- to Australia. This contains information as diverse as the Australian
- constitution, current weather and lamington recipes. Independently many other
- countries have created similar compilations, which now collectively provide an
- embryonic encyclopaedia of the world. (See Figure 4 - Part of the home page for
- the Author's "Guide to Australia", a distributed "interpedia" of information
- about Australia.)
-
- Perhaps the most significant trend is that the Web is beginning to change the way
- in which we do research, teaching and many other information based activities. An
- important new paradigm that I see emerging is what I call SINS ("Special Interest
- Networks"). These are collaborating sets of "nodes" on the network that pool
- their resources to provide a comprehensive range of information services
- (including communication, publication and "virtual libraries") about a particular
- topic. SINS extend the activity of bulletin boards and newsgroups into more
- formal areas of information exchange. Some SINS, such as the European Molecular
- Biology Network (EMBNet), have emerged spontaneously. I have been actively
- developing and promoting the idea through various projects, such as FireNet and
- the Biodiversity Information Network (BIN21).
-
- It will be several years before new institutions, such as SINS, become the norm.
- But already it is clear that if we can regard the 19th Century as the era of
- learned societies and the 20th Century as the era of paper journals, then the
- 21st Century will surely be the era of the "knowledge web". The long-term effects
- of the Web (and its possible descendants) on society are hard to predict. All we
- can say with confidence is that the social and cultural impact is likely to be
- enormous - at least as far-reaching as the introduction of television. But unlike
- TV, users can be active, not passive.
-
- We can only hope that the move from being passive spectators in the "global
- village" to active participants will benefit society. In conclusion, the Web
- provides an ideal mechanism to enhance collaboration within Australia and to
- promote Australia overseas. To open a Web server of your own does not require a
- large organization to run a server; many of the best sites have started with one
- or two dedicated individuals. The opportunities to do something new and useful,
- to make an impact, to add value to your work, are only limited by the
- imagination. (See Figure 5 - The Global Network Navigator, from O'Reilly
- publishers, combines useful free information, such as "virtual libraries", with
- commercial enterprise!)
-
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