Table of Contents Previous Chapter

Introduction

Jim Foley

1995 marks the 50th anniversary of the visionary statement by President Roosevelt's science advisor, Vannevar Bush, in which he called for dealing with the information explosion through a desk-top system, memex, using hypertext methods to access and add to world knowledge. His ideas and efforts to turn science into an active force for peaceful growth should inspire NSF's current plans to help build a National Information Infrastructure [Bush 45].

A fundamental and permanent change is occurring in the way computers are used. It is a change which has profound implications for our society, for our economy, for our computer industry, for our educational processes, for our work styles, for our life styles, and for our research agendas. We refer to the change from computer as stand-alone tool for word-processing, computation, data base management, to computer as gateway to the world of information and to the world of computer-mediated interaction with others.

It is a change whose seeds were sown by the email and file transfer capabilities of ARPANET, by the graphical user interfaces from Xerox PARC and their successful commercialization by Apple and then Microsoft, and by the economies afforded by microprocessor chips and modern telecommunications networks.

The World-Wide Web is the most visible and most important aspect of this change. It is the first large-scale realization of Bush's memex. As a technology, it has swept across the world like a wind-swept fire across the dry prairie. In less than two years since the introduction of the first widely-available GUI viewer (NCSA's first alpha release of X Mosaic was February 93), WWW is currently the second largest byte and packet mover on NSFNET [Merit 95] with over 13,000 WWW servers [net.Gensis 95] accounting for over 1.8 million URLs and an estimated 10 Gigabytes of stored/generated data [Lycos 95]. We know of no comparable growth phenomenon in the computer and communications domain. Figures One and Two display the explosive growth of the WWW.

The success of the Web is clearly and directly the consequence of strategic research investments made by government agencies. The two most significant components of the success are the Internet, started initially by ARPA and sustained and nurtured by NSF, and the Mosaic viewer, developed at NCSA, the super-computer center funded by NSF. In the last year, several companies have successfully commercialized various Web browsers, creating a thriving and rapidly growing industry.

Yet the Web is in a primitive state, just as early operating systems, computer networks, graphical user interfaces, and microprocessors were primitive by today's standards. Recognizing that the Web presents many usage and research challenges, the Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems (IRIS) Division of the National Science Foundation commissioned a workshop to provide a set of recommendations concerning:

  1. Opportunities for NSF's use of WWW for information delivery to the public and research communities.
  2. Use of WWW as an experimental platform for collaborative efforts in the IRIS and computer science research communities, including potential enhancements to WWW in support of such collaborations.
  3. Research which NSF in general and IRIS in particular should consider undertaking with respect to the WWW, its accessibility, and its usability.
The initial workshop concept was developed within NSF by Y.T. Chen, Oscar Garcia and John Hestenes. Workshop grant IRI-9423739 was awarded to Georgia Institute of Technology to conduct the workshop and support travel and miscellaneous costs.

In preparation for the workshop, the participants prepared position papers outlining various issues surrounding the Web. These position papers are included as Appendix D of the on-line version of this report <URL:http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/nsf-ws/report/Report.html>. Also in preparation for the workshop, the workshop description (Appendix C of the on-line version) was circulated to researchers and users, using WWW based electronic discussion mailing lists. Responses were requested as a way to gather additional input to the workshop process. Eight replies were received; they are found in Appendix E of the on-line version of this report.

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.

This report is divided into four major sections:

We thank all of the NSF staff members who were involved in the workshop, colleagues who responded to our requests for ideas and comments, and our individual support staffs and NSF support staff who facilitated our travel and participation in the workshop. Ms. Joan Morton and Ms. Chrissy Whitaker of Georgia Tech's GVU Center administered the workshop grant.

As NSF considers our report, we stand ready to discuss, clarify and further develop our recommendations.

References

Bush V. (1945) As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly, 176, pp.101-108.

Lycos TM <URL:http://lycos.cs.cmu.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>.

Table of Contents Next Chapter