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Executive Summary

The World-Wide Web (WWW or Web) [Berners-Lee 92] and its associated viewers has given more substance and credibility to the Information Superhighway concept than has any other technological development since the Internet itself. It offers new opportunities for collaboration among researchers, for dissemination of information, and as an object of research. Accordingly, the Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems Division (IRIS) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioned a workshop to provide a set of recommendations concerning:

  1. Opportunities for NSF's use of the WWW for information delivery to the public and research communities.
  2. Research which NSF in general and IRIS in particular should consider undertaking with respect to the Web, its accessibility, and its usability.
  3. Use of the WWW as an experimental platform for collaborative efforts in the IRIS and computer science research communities, including potential enhancements to the Web in support of such collaborations.
The workshop was held on October 31, 1994, in Arlington, and was attended by six IRIS-supported PIs, five NSF staff members from IRIS, and five NSF staff members from other divisions or directorates along with three other participants - a complete attendance list is in Appendix A. This report summarizes a set of strategic recommendations for NSF and elaborates a recommended research agenda surrounding the Web.

Before discussing specific recommendations, a bit more context is appropriate. We believe that the importance of hypermedia in general and of the WWW in particular will be ranked by historians of technology in the same class as microprocessor technology, the Internet, and graphical user interfaces. Each has had or is having substantial impact on the conduct of science, education, and business; on our country's economic competitiveness; and on our society and culture.

We see the WWW as marking the start of a new era, just as did these earlier technologies. The new era will be characterized by the democratization of computer-based information and by a global, easily-used information infrastructure which will ultimately be as ubiquitous and easy to use as the dial telephone.

Indeed, the analogy to dial phones is compelling. In the era of manual switchboards, placing a call was difficult, relatively expensive, and labor intensive. As dial phones became ubiquitous, anyone could make phone calls. So too, the WWW replaces earlier, more primitive means for accessing information - FTP, Gopher, freewais, Usenet, etc. - all of which required more sophistication and knowledge to use. WWW and its browsers dramatically decreases the effort needed to access information via networks, and are changing the ways in which people use their computers, as well as the reasons they use them.

This is reflected in the dramatic growth of Web servers (from 193 in June 1993 to 1,265 in June 1994 to 13,516 in January 1995 [net.Genesis 95]), Web users (unknowable, but estimated to be in excess of 8 million), and Web NSFNET byte traffic (from 0.002% in January 1993 to 2.6% in January 1994 to 17.6% in January 1995 [Merit 95].

While the above numbers represent dramatic and quantitative metrics, the determination of the Web's impact on society and day to day computing has yet to be thoroughly researched. Interestingly, one of the earliest issue raised during the workshop centered around the need for societal impact and usage studies . What has made the Web so popular?

Despite the rapid growth, the Web is in a primitive state, just as early operating systems and computer networks and graphical user interfaces and microprocessors were primitive by today's standards. The Web presents many usage and research challenges, and we urge IRIS, NSF, and other government agencies to step up to the opportunities thereby presented.

Key Strategic Recommendations: We believe the most important steps for NSF to take are:

  1. Establish and fund an NSF office to focus special attention on research issues concerning the WWW, and to help fund the implementation of selected Web enhancements which would greatly benefit the conduct of research, just as some years ago a special office was formed to handle networking.
  2. Target supplemental funding to PIs to do their research in the context of the WWW. For instance, a program which simulates a new chip fabrication process could be written to be usable via the WWW. An innovative search engine or visualization tool could be ported to the Web.
  3. Include criteria, when relevant, in peer reviews with respect to impact on the information infrastructure of science and engineering.
  4. Begin an active, phased program wherein the WWW becomes the standard electronic means for NSF to disseminate information to its research communities and to the public.
Additional, but lower priority Strategic Recommendations: We also recommend that NSF seriously consider whether to:

  1. Provide funding for NSF researchers to make current or past interactive systems accessible via the Web.
  2. Develop software tools for researchers, educators, and librarians to use in creating and maintaining information and software repositories.
  3. Fund the establishment and operation of archives of information and software of importance to specific NSF research communities, using the software tools developed under
    Recommendation 6.
  4. Establish an SBIR (Small Business Innovative Research) program focus on the Web, as a way to further jump-start economic development surrounding the Web.
In addition, there is an obvious need for IRIS to continue to coordinate with relevant research activities in other NSF directorates, to coordinate with other agencies, and to coordinate with the inter-agency Digital Libraries Initiative [Fox 93].

Research Agenda Summary: We recommend that at least the following topics be considered for inclusion in an NSF research program focused on issues of relevance and importance to the WWW. The research agenda is elaborated in greater length in Section 5 of the report itself.

We would expect some of the research developments to spread into regular use on the Web, via enhancements to the Web infrastructure supported in some cases by NSF or in other cases by the private sector. Just as with Internet development, NSF will have to address the question of how much infrastructure development to support.

Why does any of this matter? One can argue that none of these research issues are really WWW issues, that they are more general and apply in one way or another to networks or to multimedia or to single-user computer systems. Such an argument is at one level correct, but at another level grossly misses the importance and impact of the Web. The Web is a widely-accessible and therefore ideally placed testbed for the issues discussed here. Doing research in the context of the Web provides a rich and unmatched environment for experimentation by allowing wider use of experimental visualizations, authoring tools, search engines, browsers, etc. The Web possesses a certain dynamic, a rapid forward movement, a context of rapid exchange of ideas which can be exploited to speed up the pace of idea generation, idea development, experimentation, dissemination, and transfer into practice. We believe that an aggressive research program surrounding the Web will be good for science, for NSF, and for the further strengthening of economic activity surrounding the Web.

A relatively modest investment by NSF in this area, if technically sound and well managed, could lead to 100-fold benefits in technology transfer, thus increasing our competitive position in world commerce, that is largely driven by capability in the information technology area. NSF should also see significant improvement in its operations (e.g. proposal handling), more positive perception by the public and Congress, and leveraging of its impact on the nation's educational system.

We thank those who helped with the workshop. As NSF considers our report, we stand ready to discuss, clarify, and further develop our recommendations.

An on-line version of this report is accessible via: <URL:http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/nsf-ws/report/Report.html>. Note that the on-line version is supplemented with the internal and external position papers collected prior to the workshop.

References

Fox E., ed., (1993) Sourcebook on Digital Libraries: Report for the National Science Foundation. TR-93-35, VPI&SU Computer Science Dept., Blacksburg, VA. Available by anonymous FTP from directory /pub/DigitalLibrary on fox.cs.vt.edu.

Merit Network Information Center Services (1995) <URL:ftp://nic.merit.edu/statistics/nsfnet/>.Also see: GVU's Graphs of the NSFNET Backbone Statistics.

net.Gensis Inc. (1995) <URL:http://www.netgen.com/cgi/comprehensive>.

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