All Annotations of Hearing on the "Digital Future of the United States: Part I -- The Future of the World Wide Web"[Preview]

saved by6 people, first bymountain on 2007-03-02, last byMaggie Wolfe Riley on 2008-07-03

• Though I was privileged to lead the effort that gave rise to the Web in
  the mid-1990s, it has long passed the point of being something designed by a
  single person or even a single organization. It has become a public resource
  upon which many individuals, communities, companies and governments depend.
  And, from its beginning, it is a medium that has been created and sustained
  by the cooperative efforts of people all over the world.
• The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the
  village green, or the mails.... The Internet may fairly be regarded as a
  never-ending worldwide conversation.
• The success of the World Wide Web, itself built on the open Internet, has
  depended on three critical factors: 1) unlimited links from any part of the
  Web to any other; 2) open technical standards as the basis for continued
  growth of innovation applications; and 3) separation of network layers,
  enabling independent innovation for network transport, routing and
  information applications.
• A. Universal linking: Anyone can connect to anyone, any page can link to
  any page
• How did the Web grow from nothing to the scale it is at today? From a
  technical perspective, the Web is a large collection of Web pages (written in
  the standard HTML format), linked to other pages (with the linked documents
  named using the URI standard), and accessed over the Internet (using the HTTP
  network protocol). In simple terms, the Web has grown because it's easy to
  write a Web page and easy to link to other pages.
• What makes it easy to create links from one page to another
  is that there is no limit to the number of pages or number of links possible
  on the Web. Adding a Web page requires no coordination with any central
  authority, and has an extremely low, often zero, additional cost. What's
  more, the protocol that allows us to follow these links (HTTP) is a
  non-discriminatory protocol. It allows us to follow any link at all,
  regardless of content or ownership. So, because its so easy to write a Web
  page, link to another page, and follow these links around, people have done a
  lot of this. Adding a page provides content, but adding a link provide the
  organization, structure and endorsement to information on the Web which turn
  the content as a whole into something of great value.
• The universality and flexibility of the Web's linking architecture has
  a unique capacity to break down boundaries of distance, language, and domains
  of knowledge. These traditional barriers fall away because the cost and
  complexity of a link is unaffected by most boundaries that divide other
  media. It's as easy to link from information about commercial law in the
  United States to commercial law in China, as it is to make the same link from
  Massachusetts' Commercial Code to that of Michigan. These links work even
  though they have to traverse boundaries of distance, network operators,
  computer operating systems, and a host of other technical details that
  previously served to divide information. The Web's ability to allow people to
  forge links is why we refer to it as an abstract information space, rather
  than simply a network.
• C. Separation of Layers
• The Web, as a new application, rolled out over the
  existing Internet without any changes to the Internet itself. This is the
  genius of the design of the Internet, for which I take no credit. Applying
  the age old wisdom of design with interchangeable parts and separation of
  concerns, each component of the Internet and the applications that run on top
  of it are able develop and improve independently. This separation of layers
  allows simultaneous but autonomous innovation to occur at many levels all at
  once.
• As the Web passes through its first decade of widespread use, we still
  know surprisingly little about these complex technical and social mechanisms.
  We have only scratched the surface of what could be realized with deeper
  scientific investigation into its design, operation and impact on society.
  Robust technical design, innovative business decisions, and sound public
  policy judgment all require that we are aware of the complex interactions
  between technology and society. We call this awareness Web Science: the
  science and engineering of this massive system for the common good.[10] In order to galvanize Web Science research and education
  efforts, MIT and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom have
  created the Web Science Research
  Initiative.
• First, the Web will get better and
  better at helping us to manage, integrate, and analyze data. Today, the Web
  is quite effective at helping us to publish and discover documents, but the
  individual information elements within those documents (whether it be the
  date of any event, the price of a item on a catalog page, or a mathematical
  formula) cannot be handled directly as data. Today you can see the data with
  your browser, but can't get other computer programs to manipulate or analyze
  it without going through a lot of manual effort yourself. As this problem is
  solved, we can expect that Web as a whole to look more like a large database
  or spreadsheet, rather than just a set of linked documents.
• Digital information about nearly every aspect of our lives is being
  created at an astonishing rate. Locked within all of this data is the key to
  knowledge about how to cure diseases, create business value, and govern our
  world more effectively. The good news is that a number of technical
  innovations (RDF which is to data what HTML is to documents, and the Web
  Ontology Language (OWL) which allows us to express how data sources connect
  together) along with more openness in information sharing practices are
  moving the World Wide Web toward what we call the Semantic Web.
• Progress
  toward better data integration will happen through use of the key piece of
  technology that made the World Wide Web so successful: the link. The power of
  the Web today, including the ability to find the pages we're looking for,
  derives from the fact that documents are put on the Web in standard form, and
  then linked together. The Semantic Web will enable better data integration by
  allowing everyone who puts individual items of data on the Web to link them
  with other pieces of data using standard formats.
• To appreciate the need for better data integration, compare the enormous
  volume of experimental data produced in commercial and academic drug
  discovery laboratories around the world, as against the stagnant pace of drug
  discovery. While market and regulatory factors play a role here, life science
  researchers are coming to the conclusion that in many cases no single lab, no
  single library, no single genomic data repository contains the information
  necessary to discover new drugs. Rather, the information necessary to
  understand the complex interactions between diseases, biological processes in
  the human body, and the vast array of chemical agents is spread out across
  the world in a myriad of databases, spreadsheets, and documents.
• The unique value creation is in the integration services, not in the
  raw data itself or even in the software tools, most of which will be built on
  open source components.