Conference gyro::internet_toolss

4544.0. "Scientific American Magazine feature on Information on the Internet" by wook.ogo.dec.com::tunsrv2-tunnel.imc.das.dec.com::read (Bob Read @OGO, DTN 276-9715) Fri Mar 14 1997 10:54

Though it's a little late, the March, 1997 issue of Scientific American has a 
very interesting series of articles on Information and the Internet.  You can 
find it on-line at http://www.sciam.com/0397issue/0397intro.html or you can 
probably still find the March issue on the news stands.  

It's an interesting read.  Quoting from the introduction:

The Internet, as everybody with a modem now knows, has fallen victim to its 
own success. In a few short years, it has gone from being the communications 
province of scientists and engineers to a primary route of information 
exchange for everyone from financial analysts to fashion designers. So much 
clutter and traffic snarl the computer networks that the Clinton 
administration has announced its intention to build a new, separate 
system--the Internet II--just so that scientists can get some work done again. 

Putting the Net to work for the rest of us will be the real challenge in the 
years ahead. Electronic mail and even videoconferencing are already 
entrenched, but those applications do not cut to the heart of what the World 
Wide Web and the rest of the Internet constitute a gigantic storehouses of raw 
information and analysis, the database of all databases. Worries about the 
future of the Net usually center on the delays and access limitations caused 
by its overburdened hardware infrastructure. Those may be no more than growing 
pains, however. The more serious, longer-range obstacle is that much of the 
information on the Internet is quirky, transient and chaotically "shelved." 

In the pages that follow, noted technologists tackle questions about how to 
organize knowledge on the Internet with the aim of making it more genuinely 
useful. From a variety of standpoints, they consider how to simplify finding 
the information we desire (yes, there is life beyond today's search engines). 
They discuss the best ways to format and display data, so that everyone 
(including the blind) has maximum access to them, in as many ways as can be 
imagined. The creative technological solutions that they propose may not be 
the approaches that are finally adopted, but their ideas will certainly 
provoke further awareness and constructive thinking about the problems. 

Bringing a measure of organization and structure to an inherently fluid medium 
like the Web may help realize the 18th-century French encyclopedists' vision 
of gathering together all the world's knowledge in one place. Two centuries 
later Vannevar Bush, the U.S. director of the Office of Scientific Research 
and Development during World War II, proposed the memex, a desk containing a 
micro-film reader and stores of film that would serve as the equivalent of an 
entire research library. The memex would allow different items in the 
microfilm collection to be linked together and annotated by the reader. Bush's 
ideas influenced Ted Nelson, who conceived of the hypertext system that was 
ultimately fashioned by others into the Web. The same intellectual dynamism is 
on view in the articles in this special report. 

The authors, perhaps members of a new generation of encyclopedists, sketch a 
technological pathway that might take the Internet a step toward realizing the 
utopian vision of an all-encompassing repository of human knowledge. In this 
conception, the Internet will become a place where the musings of Homer, 
Shakespeare and Lao-tzu will reside just a mouse click away from school lunch 
menus and agendas for the next city council meeting--a permanent record of all 
human activity, from the high-minded to the mundane. 

--The Editors