The Web Based Initiative

One of the biggest obstacles that digital web-based systems for the collection and dissemination of information face is the belief that the information will have limited longevity in a digital format. While the goal of a digital system is not to fully replace the archival nature of a paper document, it is not the current web-based environment which poses a threat to digital data longevity.
A diagram representing a linear path
associated with a tradition document. The present web-based system has been safely entrenched now for more than a decade with web sites created in the early 1990s still easily accessible. What is evident now is the need for maintaining the current infrastructure not in terms of longevity (which is rarely a concern) but instead in terms of continuity.

With these changes come new ideas for a greater way of interaction. The notion of Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2003 and popularized by the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004, refers to a perceived second-generation of web-based communities and hosted services such as social networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies that facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. O'Reilly Media titled a series of conferences around the phrase and it has since become widely adopted.

Although the term suggests a new version of the web, it does not refer to an update to the World Wide Web technical specifications but rather to changes in the ways systems developers have used the web platform. According to Tim O'Reilly, "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."1 As these concepts of the web change, professional fields will need to adapt to the technology. The Internet is the fastest growing method of communication today and it is the future of the Internet which will define
A diagram representing the path associated with internet based hyperlinking. how humans acquire and share information. As the ability to interact with external sources continues to grow, the tools available from the Internet will be one of the most important places to look for information dissemination.