The Internet and the World Wide Web - Essay Example

Introduction The internet and the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) are related but they are not the same thing, as many people assume. The internet is a massive system of interconnected international networks through which people send data in diverse protocols over great distances. A protocol is the common language used to send bits of data over the internet. Consequently, different services employ different protocols. The Web is only one type of protocol encompassed within the internet. The Web is the content network that can be seen as an encyclopaedia with numerous cross references or hyperlinks which are graphically interconnected to allow the user to move from one entry or node to another on the network. It is an actively evolving social network which brings together myriad topics into a uniform hypertextual medium. It looks like a giant graph with hypertext, pages and edges as its nodes. Closely observed, the Web reveals textual matter, a tag structure, site identity and organization. In simple terms, the Web is just one of the basic structures of the much broader internet. Internet Technology The internet was first conceptualized in 1969 by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US. The internet operates on the basis of packets of data traveling to various addresses at high speed. The TCP/IP mandates that every computer connected to the internet must have an identity code that serves as its address on the net. This address used to be 16 bits in length (IPv4) but currently a 128-bit long (IPv6) is slowly replacing the original type which lacks enough variants to match the high proliferation of computers on the net. Each address, just like an e-mail address, must be unique and therefore distinct from any other. For the service to function well each service protocol is assigned a unique transport method and at least one numeric identifier ranging from 0 to 65535. This identifier is known as the port, short form of transport method used. The transport method can either be telephone like communication TCP or the postal mail-like communication UDP. For instance the WWW is assigned TCP port 80, outgoing e-mail (SMTP) is assigned port 25 while mIRC owns TCP 6660 to 6669 and UDP 113. All packets of information traveling on the network are required to carry with them the IP address and port of the source as well as IP address and port of the destination computer. This information helps in the routing of data passed on in this way. The different protocols of the internet have their own rules for communicating. The Web consists of servers or websites and clients or browsers. For the sake of intercommunication they use HTTP. Each resource such as a web page, image or video clip is identified by means of a web address known as a URI or URL. These URIs can be referenced in a page using hyperlinks. The web page is itself formatted using HTML. The structure of the internet is such that it has three levels: backbones, regional networks and local area networks (LAN). The backbones connect regional networks at a national or international level, for instance between two countries or continents. The regional networks are within countries or provinces of the same country. The LANs can be found within a company, a university or even an office with interconnected computers. Of the three, the backbones carry the largest amounts of data since they basically connect large regimes of active communication. Their bandwidths are therefore large with the ability to transport millions of packets at the same time. Examples of backbones are the European Union's Ebone or the US NSFNET or SprintLink, J. Gillies and R. Cailliau 2000. A sizeable part of the internet comprises telephone infrastructure. However, it makes a versatile use of the lines such that instead of only one level of communication taking place, such as a one-on-one conversation; the internet employs the use of statistical multiplexing in which information exchange is broken into small packets of about 200 bytes which are sent via any available combination of arcs and nodes. This data is sent at the same time as other data from other information exchanges over the same line. To achieve this, routers at each intermediate node direct the data flow depending on the identity and destination of each packet. Packets arrive at the destination in a non-sequential manner and are generally reassembled there. Web Technology In 1980, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist of repute, was greatly frustrated by the clumsy process of accessing several different machines to gather scheduling data, phone numbers and other materials. Therefore, he envisioned a hypertext protocol that could run on readily available machines on the internet. His vision was not fully realized until 1990 and has provided easy access for research material ever since, T. Berners-Lee 2000. Berners-Lee originally followed CERN's "buy, don't build" motto by asking firms vending hypertext programs to integrate his web concept. The companies had no interest. They never got the demand of the web gripping, notwithstanding the ease of adding Internet access to their products (Bernes-Lee, 2000). As such Berners-Lee had to embark on creating the software as well as specifications for the web on his own as an informal project within CERN. What made NCSA assortment prominent in reference to Bernes Lee is what Andreessen made "it very easy to install, and he supported it by fixing bugs through email any time night or day. The Web operates on the basis of classification of topics into classes, sub-classes and so on. This enables a largely orderly retrieval of required data for use by browsers, J. Abbate 2000. Notably, the system of classification is very orderly, but is not quite perfect. There are some subject areas that either overlap into others or are quite difficult to classify given that new topics arrive on the internet everyday. Some easily fall into prior classifications while others are peculiar and thus difficult to clearly classify. In addition, there are certain subject areas that by their very nature belong to more than one classification. Going into specifics the web is an actively evolving network with a convergence of myriad topics arranged in a uniform hypertextual structure. It resembles a giant graph in which nodes are hypertext pages while edges are hyperlinks. If one zooms in, there are details such as textual matter, tag structure, site identity and organization and the link such as Yahoo! If one considers this as a spider web then the spaces in between are the nodes while the strings are the links, T. Berners-Lee 2000. But then the web is growing on a daily basis thus with time there is a pattern of interlinked clusters, some larger than others, on specific subject areas. If we took the example of the name Jesus for example, the information related to this name would be about the biblical saviour of Christians. Another link on the same name would be about the Quranic Nabii Issa. A community is a subgraph whose internal link density exceeds that of connection to nodes outside it by some margin, Flake G W et al 2002. A central, strongly connected core (SCC) was identified to exist on the web. Together with this is a subgraph with directed paths that lead into the SCC, a component leading away from it and relatively isolated tendrils attached to each one of the three major subgraphs. The four regions were about a fourth of the entire web which led to the name 'bow tie' model, Brder et al 1998. The average path lengths between the connected nodes and the distribution of in and out degree have also been measured. Uses of the Internet Any mention of the internet today means several different things to different people. However, there is one common underlying principle, it provides an immense opportunity. For many students, that is the opportunity to carry out research using search engines such as Google and Wikipedia. They also have a chance to meet friends from far and wide through Face-book, exchange e-mails via yahoo and g-mail, and chat through the two and other sights interaction programmes, Borsook P 2000. To their lecturers it is not only the opportunity to exchange ideas with peers around the world, either through their websites or in live conferencing over long distances. To the entrepreneur, the internet provides a massive opportunity to advertise and trade with a large customer base, Srinagesh, Padmanabhan 1996. The internet has even been used by medical practitioners to exchange views on surgical operations, disease and generally in Evidence Based Medicine programmes, MacKie-Mason et al 1994. Accessing news through different media organizations is currently not a matter of waiting for traditional bulletin hours, but a continuous exercise. Lovers of sports get updates on results and their favourite sportsmen through the websites of clubs and sports associations. Press reporters in remote locations on the globe no longer conjecture how they used to cope without the internet, since all their reports, with pictures to boot arrive in an instant at heir officers in distant corners of the globe on time for the next edition. Had the Web Been a Privately Invented Enterprise The Web would not have been as successful and widespread as it is today if it had been invented by a private enterprise, Borsook P 2000. This is because selfish interests and a deeply rooted drive for profit would have overshadowed the need for it to be an easily accessed public utility. First of all everyone would need a password to browse. Such a password would cost colossal amounts of money thus limiting to the rich. Services such as email, chat, research and general communication would be the preserve of the well to do. This is proved by the number of private websites on the Web which can only be accessed by members or those who can afford to pay the stipulated fee. The immense success of the Web today is attributed to the large number of people who access internet. Conservative estimates have it that over 300,000,000 users browse the net on any one given day around the world, Lewell J (2008). Apart from the massive profit drive, another issue that would have put off private owners of the Web would be security. Currently cyber crime is a problem ISPs have to contend with. Hackers have come in all descriptions who access private information not meant for them. In addition, international conmen have turned the net into a playground where they carry out con games ranging from pyramid schemes to multi-million dollar swindle operations based on spurious promises of easy money to victims, Burke, R. H. (2004). Investigations into the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US show have revealed that the internet was at least partly used to help coordinate the deadly activities. The police also have to grapple with international money laundering schemes using the Web on a regular basis, Haberfield, M. R. (2005). The actual success of the Web today would not be there in the realms of commerce. Online companies have made seven-digit profit margins given the number of people they are able to reach simultaneously and instantaneously. Transfers of money are also quick and efficient. Conclusion In brief the internet and the World Wide Web have revolutionized the world in such a way that present and future generations, especially those in the developed countries, can no longer envisage a world without them. The design of NCSA Mosaic was fundamentally the work of Bina and Andreesen. Although many people contributed to its evolution, Andreesen advanced the web browser based on comments acquired through discussions in public forums. You'd send him a bug report and then two hours later he'd mail you a fix". References Abbate J 2000, Inventing the Internet, MIT Press Berners-Lee T 2000, Weaving the Web, Texere. Borsook P 2000, 'Cyberselfish', Little, Brown & Co, NY. Brder A, Bharat K, Henzinger M, Kumar P. and Venkatasubramanian S 1998, The Connectivity Server: Fast access to linkage information on the Web. In 7th World Wide Web Conference/, Brisbane, Australia. Burke, R. H. (2004). Hard Cop, Soft Cop: Dilemmas and Debates in Contemporary Policing, Willan, NY. Davison B D 2000, July, Topical locality in the Web. In /Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2000), pages 272-279, Athens, Greece. Dempsey L 1993, 'Research networks and academic information services: towards an academic information infrastructure', in Journal of Information Networks, vol.1, no.1 Dill S, Kumar S R, McCurley K S, Rajagopalan S, Sivakumar D, and Tompkins A 2001, Self-similarity in the Web. 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