Anticipating the inevitable linking of the world’s NIIs, we might someday bring into our homes the Louvre, the Hermitage and the Athens Archaeological Museum, with the ability to tailor the offerings of these grand institutions to our personal needs and interests.
What industries badly need is a universal way to communicate documents across a wide variety of machine configurations, operating systems and communication networks. These documents should be viewable on any display and should be printable on any modern printers. If this problem can be solved, then the fundamental way people work will change.
MCI Communications and The News Corporation … intend to launch a global online newspaper … the electronic newspaper, the first of its kind, would be available to users of the Internet, the worldwide network of computers.
The 21st Century is going to go past search into analysis. And what analysis really is is cross-correlating information from many sources. And then what you will be able to do is solve problems, not just find things at random. And in order to do this, what you need underneath is very fine-grain classification. That’s the only known way of handling the world of a billion repositories.
The Net of the future will have many levels of publications. You’ll have some personal documents. You’ll be the editor of a few small newsletters or clubs. You’ll be part of some professional societies and each will have a professional letter or journal, because that’s a big enough community that there will be enough people to be worth indexing in a more professional way. And so on to ever large communities … There will be a billion repositories, whether you like it or not … What we need are new architectures for systems that actually do something about analyzing and cross-correlating from multiple sources.
The true potential of the information superhighway: making everyday life for most people somewhat easier and less irritating.
Long-time users of The Internet express anxiety over what might happen as commercial interests become increasingly developed: Will they be pushed aside? Will they lose their access? Will it become too costly for them to use the Net? Besides the culture of the Internet, marketers face a number of hurdles that must be overcome if the Internet is to become the backbone of a commercially viable Information Superhighway.
Tens of millions of people will be connected to interactive services, changing the way business and society function in terms of how they get information, communicate with other people, buy products and learn new things.
About 15 percent of education will be done on the Net. More than 10 million students are in higher education today, each averaging four courses. There are 40 million courses every semester, and 1 percent are receiving any education via analog TV or satellites.
[Ten years from now the Internet is] going to be whatever big research system is possible … My belief is that it will be a billion-dollar business in the early 21st Century. And what is it? It’s not Web fetching, which is just straight access, it’s not library search, which is just what you’re going to see in the next years when you can put up a big collection and actually search it. It’s going to be correlation, analysis, coming in with a real problem and being able to look through many many different sources and say, this thing here and this thing here combined in this certain way solves my problem. So we’re going to talk about cross-correlation, generic community systems and spaces not networks.