scholarly journals Twenty years of unnecessary forward slashes: towards a post-ontological critique of Tim Berners-Lee's evolving aspirations for the Web and the World Wide Web Consortium from the cultural studies perspective

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dick
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Technological Determinism ◽  
Uniform Resource Identifier ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
The Web

Since it was first formally proposed in 1990 (and since the first website was launched in 1991), the World Wide Web has evolved from a collection of linked hypertext documents residing on the Internet, to a "meta-medium" featuring platforms that older media have leveraged to reach their publics through alternative means. However, this pathway towards the modernization of the Web has not been entirely linear, nor will it proceed as such. Accordingly, this paper problematizes the notion of "progress" as it relates to the online realm by illuminating two distinct perspectives on the realized and proposed evolution of the Web, both of which can be grounded in the broader debate concerning technological determinism versus the social construction of technology: on the one hand, the centralized and ontology-driven shift from a human-centred "Web of Documents" to a machine-understandable "Web of Data" or "Semantic Web", which is supported by the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, and the organization he heads, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); on the other, the decentralized and folksonomy-driven mechanisms through which individuals and collectives exert control over the online environment (e.g. through the social networking applications that have come to characterize the contemporary period of "Web 2.0"). Methodologically, the above is accomplished through a sustained exploration of theory derived from communication and cultural studies, which discursively weaves these two viewpoints together with a technical history of recent W3C projects. As a case study, it is asserted that the forward slashes contained in a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) were a social construct that was eventually rendered extraneous by the end-user community. By focusing On the context of the technology itself, it is anticipated that this paper will contribute to the broader debate concerning the future of the Web and its need to move beyond a determinant "modernization paradigm" or over-arching ontology, as well as advance the potential connections that can be cultivated with cognate disciplines.

scholarly journals Twenty years of unnecessary forward slashes: towards a post-ontological critique of Tim Berners-Lee's evolving aspirations for the Web and the World Wide Web Consortium from the cultural studies perspective

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dick
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Technological Determinism ◽  
Uniform Resource Identifier ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
The Web

Since it was first formally proposed in 1990 (and since the first website was launched in 1991), the World Wide Web has evolved from a collection of linked hypertext documents residing on the Internet, to a "meta-medium" featuring platforms that older media have leveraged to reach their publics through alternative means. However, this pathway towards the modernization of the Web has not been entirely linear, nor will it proceed as such. Accordingly, this paper problematizes the notion of "progress" as it relates to the online realm by illuminating two distinct perspectives on the realized and proposed evolution of the Web, both of which can be grounded in the broader debate concerning technological determinism versus the social construction of technology: on the one hand, the centralized and ontology-driven shift from a human-centred "Web of Documents" to a machine-understandable "Web of Data" or "Semantic Web", which is supported by the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, and the organization he heads, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); on the other, the decentralized and folksonomy-driven mechanisms through which individuals and collectives exert control over the online environment (e.g. through the social networking applications that have come to characterize the contemporary period of "Web 2.0"). Methodologically, the above is accomplished through a sustained exploration of theory derived from communication and cultural studies, which discursively weaves these two viewpoints together with a technical history of recent W3C projects. As a case study, it is asserted that the forward slashes contained in a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) were a social construct that was eventually rendered extraneous by the end-user community. By focusing On the context of the technology itself, it is anticipated that this paper will contribute to the broader debate concerning the future of the Web and its need to move beyond a determinant "modernization paradigm" or over-arching ontology, as well as advance the potential connections that can be cultivated with cognate disciplines.

Effective Use of the World Wide Web (WWW) for HF/E Consultants

1998 ◽  
Vol 42 (10) ◽  
pp. 714-718 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony D. Andre
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Human Factors ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Human Factors And Ergonomics ◽  
The World ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
The Web

This paper provides an overview of the various human factors and ergonomics (HF/E) resources on the World Wide Web (WWW). A list of the most popular and useful HF/E sites will be provided, along with several critical guidelines relevant to using the WWW. The reader will gain a clear understanding of how to find HF/E information on the Web and how to successfully use the Web towards various HF/E professional consulting activities. Finally, we consider the ergonomic implications of surfing the Web.

Design of a Migrating Crawler Based on a Novel URL Scheduling Mechanism using AHP

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deepika Punj ◽  
Ashutosh Dixit
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Web Crawler ◽  
Redundancy Elimination ◽  
The World ◽  
Meta Information ◽  
Elimination Mechanism ◽  
The Web

In order to manage the vast information available on web, crawler plays a significant role. The working of crawler should be optimized to get maximum and unique information from the World Wide Web. In this paper, architecture of migrating crawler is proposed which is based on URL ordering, URL scheduling and document redundancy elimination mechanism. The proposed ordering technique is based on URL structure, which plays a crucial role in utilizing the web efficiently. Scheduling ensures that URLs should go to optimum agent for downloading. To ensure this, characteristics of both agents and URLs are taken into consideration for scheduling. Duplicate documents are also removed to make the database unique. To reduce matching time, document matching is made on the basis of their Meta information only. The agents of proposed migrating crawler work more efficiently than traditional single crawler by providing ordering and scheduling of URLs.

Dark Web

2020 ◽  
pp. 152-164
Author(s):  
Punam Bedi ◽  
Neha Gupta ◽  
Vinita Jindal
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Data Dissemination ◽  
Deep Web ◽  
Web Browsers ◽  
Web Content ◽  
The World ◽  
Dark Web ◽  
The Web

The World Wide Web is a part of the Internet that provides data dissemination facility to people. The contents of the Web are crawled and indexed by search engines so that they can be retrieved, ranked, and displayed as a result of users' search queries. These contents that can be easily retrieved using Web browsers and search engines comprise the Surface Web. All information that cannot be crawled by search engines' crawlers falls under Deep Web. Deep Web content never appears in the results displayed by search engines. Though this part of the Web remains hidden, it can be reached using targeted search over normal Web browsers. Unlike Deep Web, there exists a portion of the World Wide Web that cannot be accessed without special software. This is known as the Dark Web. This chapter describes how the Dark Web differs from the Deep Web and elaborates on the commonly used software to enter the Dark Web. It highlights the illegitimate and legitimate sides of the Dark Web and specifies the role played by cryptocurrencies in the expansion of Dark Web's user base.

Web 2.0 and Beyond-Participation Culture on the Web

2009 ◽  
pp. 1537-1544
Author(s):  
August-Wilhelm Scheer
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Web Sites ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Broad Band ◽  
Local Data ◽  
Server Side ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Internet Connections ◽  
The Web

The emergence of what we call today the World Wide Web, the WWW, or simply the Web, dates back to 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext system to manage information overload at CERN, Switzerland (Berners-Lee, 1989). This article outlines how his approaches evolved into the Web that drives today’s information society and explores its full potentials still ahead. The formerly known wide-area hypertext information retrieval initiative quickly gained momentum due to the fast adoption of graphical browser programs and standardization activities of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In the beginning, based only on the standards of HTML, HTTP, and URL, the sites provided by the Web were static, meaning the information stayed unchanged until the original publisher decided for an update. For a long time, the WWW, today referred to as Web 1.0, was understood as a technical mean to publish information to a vast audience across time and space. Data was kept locally and Web sites were only occasionally updated by uploading files from the client to the Web server. Application software was limited to local desktops and operated only on local data. With the advent of dynamic concepts on server-side (script languages like hypertext preprocessor (PHP) or Perl and Web applications with JSP or ASP) and client-side (e.g., JavaScript), the WWW became more dynamic. Server-side content management systems (CMS) allowed editing Web sites via the browser during run-time. These systems interact with multiple users through PHP-interfaces that push information into server-side databases (e.g., mySQL) which again feed Web sites with content. Thus, the Web became accessible and editable not only for programmers and “techies” but also for the common user. Yet, technological limitations such as slow Internet connections, consumer-unfriendly Internet rates, and poor multimedia support still inhibited a mass-usage of the Web. It needed broad-band Internet access, flat rates, and digitalized media processing to catch on.

Standards for Web Services

2008 ◽  
pp. 47-86
Author(s):  
Bill Karakostas ◽  
Yannis Zorgios
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Web Services ◽  
Web Sites ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Comprehensive Description ◽  
Business Services ◽  
Software Technology ◽  
The World ◽  
The Web

Chapter II presented the main concepts underlying business services. Ultimately, as this book proposes, business services need to be decomposed into networks of executable Web services. Web services are the primary software technology available today that closely matches the characteristics of business services. To understand the mapping from business to Web services, we need to understand the fundamental characteristics of the latter. This chapter therefore will introduce the main Web services concepts and standards. It does not intend to be a comprehensive description of all standards applicable to Web services, as many of them are still in a state of flux. It focuses instead on the more important and stable standards. All such standards are fully and precisely defined and maintained by the organizations that have defined and endorsed them, such as the World Wide Web Consortium (http://w3c. org), the OASIS organization (http://www.oasis-open.org) and others. We advise readers to visit periodically the Web sites describing the various standards to obtain the up to date versions.

Using Semantic Web Concepts to Retrieve Specific Domain Information from the Web

2011 ◽  
pp. 249-270
Author(s):  
Rafael Cunha Cardoso ◽  
Fernando da Fonseca de Souza ◽  
Ana Carolina Salgado
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
World Wide Web ◽  
Semantic Web ◽  
Web Sites ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Specific Domain ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The World ◽  
Domain Information ◽  
The Web

Currently, systems dedicated to information retrieval/extraction perform an important role on fetching relevant and qualified information from the World Wide Web (WWW). The Semantic Web can be described as the Web’s future once it introduces a set of new concepts and tools. For instance, ontology is used to insert knowledge into contents of the current WWW to give meaning to such contents. This allows software agents to better understand the Web’s content meaning so that such agents can execute more complex and useful tasks to users. This work introduces an architecture that uses some Semantic Web concepts allied to Regular Expressions (REGEX) in order to develop a system that retrieves/extracts specific domain information from the Web. A prototype, based on such architecture, was developed to find information about offers announced on supermarkets Web sites.

Introducing the Data Quality Vocabulary (DQV)

Semantic Web ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-97
Author(s):  
Riccardo Albertoni ◽  
Antoine Isaac
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Data Quality ◽  
Working Group ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Design Principles ◽  
Metadata Model ◽  
The World ◽  
The Web

The Data Quality Vocabulary (DQV) provides a metadata model for expressing data quality. DQV was developed by the Data on the Web Best Practice (DWBP) Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) between 2013 and 2017. This paper aims at providing a deeper understanding of DQV. It introduces its key design principles, components, and the main discussion points that have been raised in the process of designing it. The paper compares DQV with previous quality documentation vocabularies and demonstrates the early uptake of DQV by collecting tools, papers, projects that have exploited and extended DQV.

The Semantic Web

2008 ◽  
pp. 505-511
Author(s):  
Kevin Curran ◽  
Gary Gumbleton
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
Semantic Web ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Software Agents ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
The World ◽  
The Web ◽  
Do So

Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), states that, “The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation” (Berners-Lee, 2001). The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents, roaming from page to page, can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users. The Semantic Web (SW) is a vision of the Web where information is more efficiently linked up in such a way that machines can more easily process it. It is generating interest not just because Tim Berners-Lee is advocating it, but because it aims to solve the problem of information being hidden away in HTML documents, which are easy for humans to get information out of but are difficult for machines to do so. We will discuss the Semantic Web here.

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