Open Hypermedia and the Web

Tim's World of Web

Tim Berners-Lee/Silvio Tanaka ©2009/CC BY 2.0

Introduction

Tim Berners-Lee, the main architect of the World Wide Web (W3), developed the system while working for CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in the late 1980s. W3 was developed to overcome difficulties with managing information exchange via the Internet. At the time finding data on the Internet required pre-existing knowledge gained through various time-consuming methods: the use of specialised clients, mailing lists, newsgroups,hard copies of link lists, and word of mouth.

At CERN, a large number of physicists and other staff needed to share large amounts of data and had begun to employ the Internet to do this. Although the Internet was acknowledged as a valuable means of sharing data, towards the end of the 1980s the need to develop simpler, more reliable methods encouraged the creation of new protocols using distributed hypermedia as a model. 

Developments in Open…

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Fully funded research studentships available for social scientists and computer scientists to study the future of the Web.

A new Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) for Web Science is part of a £250million investment in the future of UK science and technology by the RCUK Digital Economy programme, providing funded studentships for 4-year PhD training. Web Science is a new discipline that addresses:

• the study of the World Wide Web as the world’s largest and most complex engineered environment
• the impact that this information system has on human society
• the changes and accommodations necessary to maintain a pro-human Web with positive societal benefits. Web Science has an ambitious agenda; it is necessarily interdisciplinary – as much about social and organizational behaviour as about the underpinning technology of the World Wide Web. Its research programme targets the Web as a primary focus of attention, adding to our understanding of its architectural principles, its development and growth, its capacity for furthering global knowledge and communication, and its inherent values of trustworthiness, privacy, and respect for social boundaries.