Alberto Pepe edited The_World_Wide_Web.tex  over 11 years ago

Commit id: 3187f26f41ef75c622164fb5d5d67d5ea6f77217

deletions | additions      

       

\section{Introduction}  The World Wide Web introduced a set of standards and protocols that has led to the development of a collectively generated graph of web resources. Individuals participate in creating this graph by contributing digital resources (e.g.~documents, images, etc.) and linking them together by means of dereferenceable Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) \cite{lee94}. While the World Wide Web is primarily a technology that came to fruition in the early nineties, much of the inspiration that drove the development of the World Wide Web was developed earlier with such systems as Vannevar Bush's visionary Memex device \cite{vbush} and Ted Nelson's Xanadu \cite{nelsonht}. What the World Wide Web provided that made it excel as the \textit{de facto} standard was a common, relatively simple, distributed platform for the exchange of digital information. The World Wide Web has had such a strong impact on the processes of communication and cognition that it can be regarded as a revolution in the history of human thought -- following those of language, writing and print \cite{harnad1991}.