(9:00 AM, Thursday, Solis-Cohen Auditorium)

Joseph Hardin

National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Associate Director for Software Development
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

"The Evolution of a Digital World Wide Communication System -- From Information to Interaction"


The phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web over the last year is simply part of the exponential growth of the global internet. We have watched as the emergence and adoption of systems like NCSA Mosaic, other web browsers and the components of the web infrastructure have begun to transform the way people and institutions provide information. Increasingly, the problems of information provision and maintenance have shifted from simply making local sets of information visible to the community to finding ways to bring coherence to the global information mass - browsing gives way to the ability to do directed searches for specific information. We must ulitmately be able to ask the web a question. Recent developments in this area will be addressed in this talk.

At the same time, simply the exchange of information is not the end goal of much of the work developing on the web. Ultimately, people want to be able to work with other people across the web as easily as they do with local colleagues. Interaction in the form of workgroups forming and engaging in extended projects is a focus for much of this work, which touches on many issues in computer support for cooperative work as well as education. The efforts under way at NCSA on net-based collaborative technologies will extend the discussion of what we want to do with information, colleagues with common interests, and students once we have found them, or they have found us.

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