Crib sheet: Internet of the future
- Article 65 of 77
- Information Age, December 2003
Researchers around the world – at Caltech, CERN and elsewhere – are working to fix the flaws in the Internet, that will make the web faster, more secure, more personalised and more interactive.
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Fortunately, there is a solution: IP version six. As well as increasing the number of IP addresses to about 340 billion billion billion billion - more than the number of grains of sand in the Sahara desert - IPv6 offers a number of other benefits, including built-in security and encryption, self-configuration, and quality of service (QoS) improvements.
Most major operating systems now support IPv6, as do a growing number of routers and other networking equipment. But the standard is not wholly backwards compatible, which has slowed its rate of adoption. Also, certain network configurations will no longer work under IPv6 and will need to be rethought by enterprises. And for the Internet to continue to reach all parts of the world, all parts of the world will need to start using IPv6. But, despite these problems, a choice will need to be made - soon.
The web tailored to the user
Despite developers' best efforts, the Internet remains largely an impersonal place. Better categorisation of web pages would help to improve the searching process and thus personalise the experience. But with more than three billion web sites now online, even thousands of web-cataloguing computers can take days to rank new sites.
Google says that a ranking system that produced results personalised for the individual web user would take some 5,000 computers about five days to complete.
But as advances in algorithms continue, topic-based searching should become possible at least. What would help Google and other search engine companies is if web pages had descriptions of themselves that were machine-readable. This so-called 'semantic web', now being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), uses embedded descriptions based on XML and the resource description framework (RDF) to give search engines a clear understanding of a web page beyond just the words used in the text. Armed with this information, search engines could offer far better results, personalised to the user's preferences. All that is now needed is for the standards to be adopted to the point where search engines recognise semantic web information as well as they understand current web pages.
What if the web talked back?
The web was never intended to be simply the world's biggest library. According to its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, the original vision had been to design a “creative and collaborative space where people could build things together”. While blogging and instant messaging (IM) have captured some of that intent, truly collaborative working remains some way off.
'Sparrow Web', which is being developed by researchers at Xerox, promotes a different genre of web page: the community-shared page, which can be modified or added to by any interested contributor as easily as they can read the page.
Another development is virtual whiteboarding, in which different users 'draw' on a shared window. This is already available today in certain programs. And improved bandwidth will ensure audio and potentially video-based collaboration will be possible.
But a technology called the session initiation protocol (SIP) has the potential to create true Internet-based collaboration. All SIP users have SIP addresses. When they want to call another SIP user, they send an invite request over the Internet to the recipient's address. This request contains the caller's preferred media types and formats. The sender's and recipient's computers can then negotiate the best mode of communication for both parties. If the recipient is not available on their usual phone, for example, his or her system will redirect the call to another phone, an IM session or an email, depending on the sender's preferences.
Is it here already?
The Internet was originally developed for academics and the US government, but ever since its worldwide adoption, its original users have been developing a better, faster version - which they intend to keep for themselves.
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