Session 11: Episode 3(3) — Birth & explosion of the World Wide Web William P. Hall President Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org [email protected]http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net Access my research papers from Google Citations
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Episode 3(3): Birth & explosion of the World Wide Web - Meetup session11
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Session 11: Episode 3(3) —
Birth & explosion of the World Wide Web
William P. Hall President Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org [email protected] http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net
From the point of view of information science, the last session considered how the growth of knowledge overwhelmed paper-based libraries and how computers changed scholars’ personal access to published knowledge
Tonight we begin to explore how the Internet and World Wide Web grew from research into broad-scale communications networks into the technology that now gives billions of people nearly universal access to the bulk of externally preserved knowledge in the world.
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Episode 3(3) – Birth & explosion of the World Wide Web The World Wide Web
Web Origins and History Vannevar Bush’s Memex Tim Berners–Lee Invents the World Wide Web Basic Web Tools The Web Explodes How Much Knowledge Does the Internet Access?
Was the communications infrastructure of the Internet invented to retain command &
control after a nuclear war?
— Hardware, standards, applications
(glossed over in the book)
Some think DARPA invented the internet to help command and control survive a nuclear first strike
ARPA/DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) – Established 1958 to formulate and execute research and
development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science.
Packet-switching vs direct point-to-point networking – Data streams cut into standard sized blocks wrapped in header information
used by interface message processors (routers) to direct the contents to a particular destination
– One sending device can direct packets to many different destinations & vice versa
– Video: Computing Conversations: Vint Cerf on the History of Packets
– 1968-9 research project to develop packet-switching interfaces between different ARPA labs so computer resources could be shared
– Packet switching offered a solution for slow & unreliable connections Needed to cope with multiple paths
Packets arriving out of order
Lost packets
Duplicated packets (i.e., same packet received via different routes) 4
Vannevar Bush – engineer – WWII Headed U.S. Office of Sci Res & Dev’t (OSRD) – initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project – 1945 Atlantic Monthly article “As we may think”
Memex – see Life Magazine take on it – Bush developed concept in 1930’s – Based on storing, indexing, & retrieving
microfilm images – Based on indexing textual/visual object
to one-another as the knowledge worker developed concepts
– Applied concept of “associative memory” to understand relationships of content objects (mapping of memory of an object against other objects)
– Also included ability to annotate all relationships or links
Basis for hypertext/hypermedia concept developed by Ted Nelson & Doug Engelbart 8
Tim Berners–Lee (1989-91) – Hypertext as an organizational knowledge management system for
preserving & managing knowledge at CERN “a ‘web’ of notes with links (like references) between them is far more
useful than a fixed hierarchical system… to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards” [1990. Information Management: A Proposal]
– Concept included application independent standards for HTML – markup tags to encode document formats & components defined
using a simple SGML document type description
HTTP – a request-response protocol implemented in the client-server computing model
URL – (1992-4) a way to express and locate the unique address for a file that is accessible on the Internet
– Two types of applications give life to the standards Browser – end-user ‘client’ application for retrieving, presenting and
traversing information resources on the World Wide Web
Web server – system storing, processing and delivering web pages to clients via HTTP 9
Discovery tools & retrieval tools are essential – Web directories were initially important but now essentially extinct
Generally human curated catalogs of websites organized by some conceptual categorization, e.g., DMOZ, Yahoo Directory
Labor intensive and difficult to administer
– Automated search engines – technologically complex, vastly powerful Web crawler visits linked web pages under control of policy to collect
metadata and content for indexing Indexing engine indexes web pages by content, metadata, and perhaps
other factors such as numbers of ingoing and outgoing links according to search engine specific policy
Query processing applies input from user against actively maintained indexes to identify relevant web pages and returns links to these pages to the user.
Rise and fall of the web portals – Attempt to syndicate and provide access to range of information
retrieval & display tools via a single “easy to use” web page (e.g., Yahoo, Bigpond)
– For search, simplicity (e.g., Google), won the day – Portal technology still provides front-ends to corporate intranets 11
Web (and Internet) highly subsidized by the US government – Communications infrastructure
– Storage
major fractions of the knowledge being placed in the Web were freely available to end users
Fuelled by the growing epistemic value of the content that can be retrieved essentially for free, the Internet's rate of growth was unprecedented in human history
– soon grew beyond anything that was economically capable of gov’t support
Rise of the commercial (ISP)
– Similar organization and fees to commercial telecoms
1A host is a domain name having an IP address record associated with it
2A domain is a domain name that has name server (NS) records associated with it and subdomains or hosts within the global domain.
WebSites are specifically HTTP servers for HTML & other objects.
3Web sites to Hosts Ratio – roughly estimates the percent of Web surfing people that are trying to become the Web authors by creating their own Web sites.
Tony Smith (1995) “Why the Web” (before I knew it existed) – modest extra layer on established & working technologies
– Developers worked in real world with open collaboration
– URL is human-readable and printable way to address any Internet resource
– Climate for the Web established by a succession of grand visions
– Marc Andreessen built a user-friendly graphical interface
– Newbies rapidly found the Web effectively eliminated distribution and publication costs for desk-top publishing
Puts the evolutionary growth of knowledge into hyperdrive
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The World Wide Web links a vast network of … actors, human, non-human, material and ethereal. The six above-listed causes of the Web’s success dance with those actors across a profusion of interconnections. The ideas of human visionaries become memes propagating an epidemic of Web ‘surfing’. The Web’s computer codes become epidemic across the Internet. Loops in the Web’s links, and in its actor-network, feed back positively and cybernetically—fuelling its continued near exponential growth and its ever-accelerating transformation into cyberspace proper. [Smith 1995]
– Increasing epistemic power Web applications are making more and more decisions on their own
before consulting their human users
Able to make decisions with ever increasing information sources
– Generalization/convergence more and more functions incorporated in single applications
e.g., Google Earth/Maps as a geolocated memory prosthesis
Future – Increasing replacement (not extension) of human cognitive functions
E.g., spatial navigation
E.g., memory and recall (life-logging?)
– Emergent functions Global brain?
– Burnout?
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Next session
Wrapping up the Web – I’ve already covered concepts fro most of the book sections listed
below in earlier Meetup sessions
– Here I’ll say a bit more about how the technology carries out cognitive processes in the Web
– I hope Tony will join me in a free-form discussion of Web history and our experiences with it
– There is a lot more to be said about human interactions with the technology and the Web, but that will be left until after an Interlude where I take a much deeper look from physical and evolutionary points of view at the emergence and interrelations of life and knowledge
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Episode 3(4) - Emerging cognition in the Web itself Retrieving Value from the Web Semantically