5 December 2001

Event Report

"The Future of the Internet and the Web"

 

Peter Milford, Corporate Manager at ServerHouse (this is an external hyperlink), hosts for the evening, introduced us to their state of the art co-lo premises on the Delme Place on the Cams Estate.

Tony Mundy, Economic Development Manager at Fareham Borough Council, introduced us to faretec the serviced offices soon to be available at Carnac Court on the Cams Estate.

The focus for the evening was a keynote speech from David De Roure (this is an external hyperlink), Professor of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton (this is an external hyperlink). Prof. De Roure's speciality is large-scale adaptive information systems. He is Programme Co-Chair of the WWW2002 Conference (this is an external hyperlink) and a member of the advisory committees of the World Wide Web Consortium (this is an external hyperlink) and the IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing (this is an external hyperlink).

Prof. De Roure explored the Future of the Internet and the Web. The speech started from basic definitions and warned us to beware acronym hell. He introduced us to Tim Berners-Lee and Ted Nelson and tracked the dramatic and continuing growth of subscribers and websites.

10 key issues were explained

1. IPv6
2. New access technologies
3. XML design goals
4. Metadata
5. Shared vocabularies
6. The semantic web and the knowledge lifecycle
7. The conceptual web services stack based on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language)
8. Grid computing prototype architecture
9. Disappearing computers
10. Agent based computing

Prof De Roure concluded that these technologies aren't all available in product yet and won't be for some time! He suggested that we get ready for this future by choosing between solutions by putting manual effort into things that aid automation rather than one-off hand-crafted web sites.