By John Browning (browning@well.sf.ca.us)
CERN, a European center for particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland, has developed an intriguing new tool for managing the cornucopia of information linked to the Internet. The World-Wide Web (W3), a global hypertext system, provides links between a phrase in one document and related information elsewhere. Unlike some hypertext, however, the links in W3 connect across the Net. Click on a phrase highlighted in a document called up from, say, a W3 server in Cambridge, Massachusetts and - zzzip - you get related information from another document in Tokyo.
W3 evolved from tools created to help CERN physicists track the huge quantities of data generated by their experiments. By putting a link into a report on an experiment, a researcher could give his colleagues a quick and easy way of peeking at the underlying data, should they wish to do so. A link can also query an online database to generate a completely new document, containing the latest information.
Today, W3 provides an eclectic collection of information, including a database of poetry, documents from Project Gutenberg (which is making classics of literature available in electronic form), computer algorithms from MIT, weather information, library catalogs, and a biochemical database. Usage has grown tenfold in the past year, and Tim Berners-Lee, who has been responsible for developing the system, expects that the pace of growth will accelerate as more and better software for accessing W3 becomes available.
So far, pretty point-and-click interfaces for accessing W3 have only been available for Unix workstations, but Macintosh and Windows versions will soon be released. As more and more client software becomes available, Berners-Lee expects more and more information to be woven into the web. Those on the Internet can try out W3 for themselves. Telnet to: info.cern.ch.
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