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#2 DCI Report from Tom Vassos and Jacqueline Fortin
Well it's Wednesday and there were several conference sessions
that we attended (hence, this long note).
To help you determine if there's anything of interest for you in
this report, we've put together the highlights of what's covered:
1. Ira Goldstein, Director, Director, OSF Research
"Whither Wanders the Web and Why"
A snapshot of some leading Web sites and approaches
2. "WWW Publishing: Combining Content and Community"
A case study of HotWired Magazine Web Site
3. "Integrating E-Mail with the WWW"
NCD Mariner Software package
4. Interleaf's Cyberleaf Publishing Package
5. "A Framework for Intelligent Agents"
6. "The State of Web Standards"
Fairly technical information about Internet Standards
(Be aware, some of these presentations are from vendors
trying to sell things!...)
Notes from Tom Vassos:
Keynote Speech:
Ira Goldstein, Director, OSF Research (http://www.osf.org)
"Whither Wanders the Web and Why"
http://riwww.osf.org:8001/~irag
What is the next revolution in Personal Computing?
The Web.
Based on FTP, Gopher, and http links:
As of Feb 2, 1995
2,825,000 urls
Growth of the Web = 1,804 %
(this is only the public web)
Ira asked the audience how many people view information
on an internal Web. 50% of the audience said they did.
Therefore many Web estimates may be dramatically under-estimating
its real size.
4 Roles of the Web
1. World-Wide information repository (science, art, museums,
virtual maps, government information, etc.)
Shoemaker-Levy WWW pages tracked a comet. Within days of
the sighting, info was up on the Web. Not only were scientists
accessing this info, but students throughout the world were able
to see the info.
Le WebLouvre, Paris. The real Louvre objected to this Web
site. The French ministry of culture objected because of the
unauthorized dissemination of French cultural information.
This tiny little server then became an entire Web worldwide
network serving this info to thousands of people. (They
also changed their name to keep the French government happy.)
A Museum subway map was created to take you to several
famous sites throughout the world. You simply click on the
subway stop you want and you're taken to another part of the
world.
2. Enterprise Knowledge Structure
3. Digital Commerce
Gordon Biersch Brewery allows you to place an order.
4. An environment for the individual and the home.
Home: Friends, extended family, etc. Every person becomes
both a merchant and a customer.
This environment links you with work, school, church, political
party, etc.
You can now put your digital photographs on the Web
and make them instantaneously available to your friends
and family around the world. Your mother won't have to
call to ask for photos of the grandkids. She'll just be
able to look it up on the Web.
The movie "Disclosure": You walk down a virtual hallway
in the office and to look at information you reach forward
for the filing cabinet and pull out the file you need to see.
In the movie though, you only had access to your company
info. Of course the Web allows you to find info on any
company.
The WWW General Catalogue is a catalogue of catalogues.
The Virtual Shareware Library (University in Slovenia) was
created as the library of libraries. It accesses info on
20 different shareware archives. It has a form which
asks you what type of software you want and provides you
with access to the appropriate information. This site is getting
400,000 requests per month.
WISE (World-Wide Info System for R&D Efforts)
The Internet Public Library (University of Michigan) contains
a catalogue, a map of the library, a reference desk, a MOO
(interaction capability with a real person), a library cat that
roams the shelves.
Webhound Personalized Document Filtering System: Alleviates
the info overload problem.
Agent Technology:
Agents can facilitate the creation of group hotlists created by
several agents from several people.
Technical Challenges:
Information, Passive or Active?
Sun's HotJava product can send dynamic info/executable programs.
Speculations on the near future:
A revolution in the way we share, transmit and access knowledge
is occurring.
Speaker: Jonathan Steuer
"WWW Publishing: Combining Content and Community"
http://www.cyborganic.com/
This chart was used to describe several Internet technologies
and to help you understand that whatever your vividness or
interactivity requirements are, you can probably accomplish
it somehow on the Internet.
| virtual reality
|
|
| several more
Vividness | CD items were listed
|
|
| e-mail IRC
|
|_________________________________________
Interactivity
Organizational models you may consider using on the Internet:
* Publishing
* Broadcast
* Film
* Nightclub
* Theme park
Consider making your model as interactive as possible. Don't
jump to conclusions on which model above is most appropriate.
People want to be entertained.
Next was a Case Study of HotWired which has about 160,000
subscribers.
Before they launched their offering, they built a community of
people to help them make several early decisions.
Content only goes up online one month after it appears in
the hard copy magazine. (This is to avoid a loss of hard copy
magazine sales.)
The HotFlash highlights note goes out via e-mail and describes
the highlights of that month's issue. (About 50,000 subscribers.)
The advantage of the e-mail listserv approach vs a WWW
approach is that you don't have to depend on users coming
back to your site. You go to them, monthly, weekly, etc.
Combining content with community: trying to get people to
gather around the "information campfire".
Advertisers have banners that users can click on to see the
advertisement. This is really the only medium in the world
that an advertiser can actually determine exactly how many
people viewed their advertisement.
HotWired also has the ability to determine how users navigated
through their pages. This helped them determine how they
could improve the layout of their pages.
Be careful when people quote number of hits. For example,
each gif image transferred counts as a hit. One screen with
9 gifs = 10 hits.
HotWired Lessons:
Metaphors and maps: Difficult to visualize where you are in the
publication so they added an unguided tour and they redesigned
their home page to include what's in each of the sections.
Registration process: Violated user expectations at the time.
Original home page simply asked people if they were a member
or not. This turned away about 40% of the users that never
bothered to read further.
Discussion area is not very popular. Could be partially due to
the usability of the user interface. Advanced features include
allowing users to post html which may include graphics or
links to their site. This type of discussion area needs to be
nurtured, ie., monitored, fed with appropriate info, etc.
Mike Dolan, Network Computing Devices
miked@ncd.com
"Integrating E-Mail with the WWW"
http://www.ncd.com
With all of the hype over the WWW, it would be a crime to
ignore the power of E-mail. Often people get so excited about
the sex appeal of the WWW, that they ignore the power of E-mail.
WebMail Project: Web-centric Servers
Actually creates html output. Can be used by anyone with a
standard Web browser.
NCD Mariner: Provides additional e-mail composing options.
Integrated fully with the Web. (i.e., can have a URL in the
mail body which you can hyperlink from.) Not an announced
product yet, but info will eventually be posted at their URL:
http://www.ncd.com
When looking at these Web-based mail packages, look for
off-line capabilities. (i.e., can you handle your mail while
being off-line?)
Kim Wesselman, Interleaf
"Managing the Evolution of Your Web"
www.ileaf.com
This presentation was more a product presentation for Interleaf's
new product.
Interleaf's Cyberleaf Publishing Package combines document
management hyperlinking, and conversion capabilities in one
product. It provides html conversion for MS Word, WordPerfect,
Interleaf and FrameMaker. Allows people to continue to use
the word processing package they're already familiar with.
It also provides the creation of hypertext links through a simple
point-and-click method.
Cyberleaf also provides tools to management validity of hyperlinks
(i.e., identifies broken links, etc.)
Includes support for html 3.0 tables.
To get a 30 day evaluation copy of Cyberleaf, send a note to:
idirect@ileaf.com
The traditional method companies are using to create a Web site
is to have a Web publishing department. That model should move
towards a model whereby employees are empowered to put up info
directly to the Web. (The old model creates a bottleneck.)
(note from Tom: I'd be careful about this recommendation. I
believe most companies (probably for the first couple of years)
should probably maintain some pretty good centralized control
of their final Web publishing efforts.)
John Vittal
"A Framework for Intelligent Agents"
Recent articles about intelligent agents have appeared in Wall
Street Journal, Business Week, etc.
Personal agents are meant to help manage information overload
for you. They will hide detail from you that you wouldn't want
to see anyway.
Range of "agentness":
Static profile
Dynamic profile
Personal memory
Dynamic memory
Active agents
A static profile is created by the user.
A dynamic memory learns from you.
Agents Today:
News Filter/Search such as
InfoSeek
Farcast (News Wires)
Individual
Timely Information
Tax tips
E-Mail Filters
(part of Eudora version 3)
If the message is from this person, delete it automatically.
Farcast News Filter:
Only send me articles that mention IBM in any publication.
If you search filter the word "agents", most filters are not
smart enough. They also give you info on travel agents and real
estate agents, etc. There are too many dumb "agents" out
there.
Finding things on the Web is getting very difficult....over
3 million Web sites are now registered. Intelligent agents
can be very valuable.
Having a party? Send the agent for flowers, reservations, etc.
The problem is that this simple task is actually very complicated.
One task may be dependent on the other.
Integrating information for travel: An agent should be able to
assist with plane schedules, directions, weather, hotels,
restaurants, etc.
Agent Architecture
The agent can exist on your machine or near the data itself
at the other end of the network. (Transportable agents)
The advantage of this is that it reduces network traffic.
To implement agents, you need an infrastructure (telescript,
enabled mail, etc.) and a language.
General Magic will be trying to make telescript a standard.
Everything is an object. Telescript is an interpreted language.
Agents can talk to each other. Agents can spawn other agents.
An agent is like your own personal secretary or gofer.
You can give it a certain amount of money to make
purchases. Once you release it, how do you find it
again? Should the agent identify itself every day?
Agent control is an issue.
Knowbots (work done by V Cerf in 1988)
"The State of Web Standards"
Dr. Larry Masinter, Xerox, Palo Alto Research Centre,
Who develops Web standards? Individuals, companies,
consortia (W3C, CommerceNet), and standards organizations
(Internet Engineering Task Force - IETF, ANSI's IISP - Information
Infrastructure Standards Panel, etc). (note from Tom: I sit on
ANSI's IISP panel, but it is more related to the Information
Superhighway than the Web.)
This presentation will focus on IETF standards activities.
Internet standards documents include "Internet-Drafts" (working
documents) and RFCs (Request for Comments). IETF Standard
Levels include "proposed standards", "draft standards" and
"standards".
The HTML Working Group is chaired by Tim Berners-Lee and
Eric Sink. The charter of this group is to define HTML based
on existing practice on the Internet, make SGML compliant.
HTML 2.0 is a "proposed standard" and HTML 3.0 is an
internet-draft.
HTML 3.0 includes tables, text flow around captioned figures,
math equations, style sheets, CJK character sets (Chinese,
Japanese, Korean), file upload, etc.
Question from Audience:
Are Netscape extensions all included in the HTML 3.0 standard?
Answer: No. HTML 3.0 includes many of the extensions that
Netscape is using but not all of them.
HTML has several design goals including support for the
visually impaired.
There are several considerations with style sheets. One of the
goals of style sheets is to make it simple and easy to learn.
There are also several limitations of what fonts are available
to what users.
The HTTP Working Group charter is creation of HTTP
specifications.
HTTPng (stands for HTTP Next Generation) is meant to improve
some of the inefficiencies of HTTP 1.0. Design goals include
simplicity, performance, asynchronicity and mandatory display.
The HTTP Security Working Group works on issues such as
Secure-HTTP, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), Digest Access
Authentication (DAA) and Mediated Digest Authentication (MAA).
DAA is a simple authentication mechanism with no passwords
in the clear.
The Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) Working Group chair is
Larry Masinter (presenter). There is a potential move towards
something called a Uniform Resource Name (URN) which is
a name independent of location. This tries to resolve the
problem of trying to find a URL that has now moved. Because
it has moved, the URL has changed. Theoretically, a
URN name would not change, even though the location may
have changed. Several URN schemes are being discussed
and a URN "bake-off" is planned to evaluate several alternatives.
(Issues to analyze include lookup performance, scaling,
authentication, and access control.)
Larry also discussed URCs...Uniform Resource Characteristics
as well as relative URLs which is a subset of the entire URL.
Use relative URLs inside your Web site.
There is a revision occurring to the MIME standard as it
moves from a proposed to a draft standard.
Graphics and the Web
Discussed the Unisys patent of the gif technology. Also
mentioned JPEG (for storing photographic images) and PNG
(Portable Network Graphics), and Embedded Figures (which
looks like it will become part of HTML), PDF as a Web
formatting language, scripting languages (Java, Safe-TCL),
document management and the Web, language support,
Virtual Reality Modelling Language (which will allow a
consumer to simulate a walk through a shopping mall) (VRML
is largely derived from SGI's Openinventor format), etc.
"In conclusion, these are interesting times. A substantial
chunk of researchers in user interface, system architecture,
information retrieval, etc. are focusing efforts on the net.
There's lots of activity, innovation, bad ideas and good ideas.
The shake-out will take a long time."
That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow.
Tom Vassos Jacqueline Fortin
***********************************************************************
TOM VASSOS, B.E.S., M.B.A., Part-time Instructor, University of Toronto
Internet Writer, Educator, Speaker: Call for courseware, keynotes, etc.
Manager, Internet Marketing Strategies, IBM Software Solutions Division
E-MAIL: vassos@vnet.ibm.com PHONE: 416-448-2189 FAX: 416-448-2893 (c)
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