WEAVING A WEB FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCIENCE

The global nature of geological sciences has necessitated the development of "community standards" for terminology, and for collection, exchange and storage of data and information. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [1] has developed the global standards (e.g., HTML) that have enabled the explosive growth of the Web of today, and is developing the standards for the Web of tomorrow. For the geosciences and the larger scientific community, these new Web standards promise to expand communication, data exchange and understanding between people, communities and systems.

The early Web was a Web of HTML documents shared among researchers. The advent of XML as the atomic unit of data exchange is making it easier for communities to share their applications and data, as well as their documents. Web Services is a growing suite of XML standards to enable a Web of programs, supporting application-to-application interaction over a network. The Semantic Web enables a Web of data, supporting sharing of information across different applications, enterprises, and communities. These standards establish a syntax for describing each community's terms and data schema, and make it easy to relate terms and data within a given community and between different communities.

What might be the benefits if the geoscience community took full advantage of the new Web standards? What if these standards allowed computer applications to read the meaning of the data (e.g., the definition, units, origin, relationships), as well the data themselves? And what if other communities in academia, industry and government employed the same standards? There would be obvious benefits from improved computer-enabled networking with the broader geosciences, journal, emergency management, arms control, cartography, funding, equipment, transportation, etc. communities. Because the underlying standards would be the same, there would be expanded opportunities for sharing tools within this Web of communities. Enhanced communication, collaboration, creativity, directed and serendipitous discovery and new levels of efficiency would all be distinct possibilities.

[1] W3C. http://www.w3.org