The Internet, The Web And Evolutions Thereof

In modern speech, we often conflate the terms 'internet' and 'web' but in actual fact, there are subtly important differences. The World Wide Web According to the first web page ever created, the World Wide Web is: "The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents." (Berners-Lee, 1990) In other words, the World Wide Web (W3, WWW or the Web), is a written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and supplemented with resources such as sounds, images and videos. (Berners-Lee & Cailliau, 1990) Development of the Web began in 1989 and in November 1990 Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist at CERN, completed a server, browser, text editor and some web pages - all the essentials of the Web. This was a basic version of the WWW and was only text-based. (Berners-Lee, 1990; Berners-Lee, n.d.) The Internet The Internet, or Net, on the other hand is the vast computerised network of networks upon which the web operates. (The Linux Information Project, 2005) Because of the many internets that have been designed over the years, it is hard to say when or by whom the Internet was developed. The internet truly started taking its modern form with the creation of ARPANET by the US Department of Defence. This system, which later became NSFNET and the modern internet backbone, was used by military and academic researchers to share information for their mutual benefit and ultimately the benefit of the American government. (Gregory, 2011) It was based on the TCP and IP data protocols that run the Internet to this day but we now also have a wide range of other protocols which allow the Internet to be used for e-mail, gaming, torrenting and numerous other functions - including, of course, the Web. Governance It is often said that the Internet and Web is a lawless place, and to an extent this is true. There are thousands of individual networks upon which the internet works and there is no central body dictating how these networks should conduct their business and set their policies. There is however one organisation, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), that administers Domain Names and IP addresses on the Net. (ICANN, 2011) There are also many guiding bodies of the Web that, although they do not control the way it operates, they are the de facto authorities on such matters and set the standards for pages, browsers and servers. The most notable of such bodies is the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C. This organisation was set up in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee to steer the Web in a manner which fosters collaboration and interoperability. The W3C is responsible for the development and maintenance of important Web standards such as HTML, CSS, XML, XHTML and SVG. (W3C, 2012) Web 2.0 Web 2.0, although it may sound like version number for the Web technology, is actually a reference to the perception of a new breed of websites that allow user-created content and the interconnectivity of people, as opposed to the original read-only sites. (DiNucci, 1999) Great examples of Web 2.0 are sites like YouTube and Wikipedia where there is very little content created by the site owners, most of it coming from the users of the sites. Other examples include social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. The point is arguable though, that this definition of Web 2.0 accurately represents the World Wide Web as it was originally envisioned and developed by Tim Berners-Lee in the 90s. He said in an interview with Scott Laningham of IBM: ".Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along." (Berners-Lee, 2006) It could therefore be said that Web 2.0 was actually just the fruition of what the Web was meant to be. After the term was coined in 1999 by DiNucci, it was almost unheard of and did not come into wide usage until the mid-2000s when it was popularised by Tim O'Reilly in his Web 2.0 Conference. (O`Reilly & Battelle, 2004) The Web App As the move the client side is a fundamental aspect of Web 2.0 (WebAppRate, 2010), the website application, or web app, was a major development of the 2.0 movement. Web apps are sites that perform in-browser functions that in the pre-2.0 days would need a desktop application. Examples include webmail (like Hotmail), online office software (Google docs) and calendars (Yahoo Calendar). Web 3.0, the Semantic Web Web 3.0 is a general term used by many people when they are describing where they would like to see the Web develop in the future. The main meaning, and accepted definition among the Web Developer community is the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is: "The Semantic Web is a common Framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise and community boundaries." (W3C, 2013) Currently, there are heaps of unstructured data in the Web and most of that data is proprietary and closed off. In the Semantic Web, that data will be written in structured manor using a data markup language such as Resource Descri ption Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL) or Microdata. It is then available to anyone, using any application, in any country, working for any company. The end goal is analogous to the Web 2.0 movement where the content creator started being user, in 3.0, it is the computer itself. You could search for a concert ticket on Google and it would tell you your Facebook friend was selling one on Gumtree. This is where the term 'linked data' comes in, another name for the Semantic Web. Basically, we will have Web 3.0 when every piece of data on the Web is machine readable, understandable and inferences can be made about it by computers. (W3C, 2010) Conclusion To conclude, the Internet and Web are to distinct but related concepts. The Internet is an integrated network of networks which allows the transmission of data to almost any part of the world and the Web is the interlinked document stored on the Internet. The Internet has developed from small network of research machines and the Web has developed from some text-only links to the most ubiquitous technology in modern life. The Web still has developments to come with the expansion of Web 3.0 and its linked data. References Berners-Lee, T., 1990. World Wide Web. [Online] Available at: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html [Accessed 3 November 2013]. Berners-Lee, T., 2006. developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee [Interview] (22 August 2006). Berners-Lee, T. & Cailliau, R., 1990. WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project. [Online] Available at: http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html [Accessed 4 November 2013]. Berners-Lee, T., n.d. The WorldWideWeb browser. [Online] Available at: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html [Accessed 2 November 2013]. DiNucci, D., 1999. Fragmented Future. PRINT, pp. 32, 221-222. Gregory, 2011. Roads and Crossroads of the Internet History. [Online] Available at: http://www.netvalley.com/cgi-bin/intval/net_history.pl [Accessed 4 November 2013]. ICANN, 2011. BYLAWS FOR INTERNET CORPORATION FOR ASSIGNED NAMES AND NUMBERS. 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