The World Wide Web - Enabling Semantic Web Services: The Web Service Modeling Ontology - page 7

The idea of hypertext, i.e. the idea of documents that contain references
that allow one to jump to another text or document, or to a different part of
the same document, was not completely new. The concepts can be viewed as
dating back to Vannevar Bush's Memex, presented in an article in the Atlantic
Monthly back in 1945, where he described a vision - though never actually
constructed - of a mechanical device that allowed texts in topics to be linked
with each other and allowed one to navigate via these connections. 4
Tim Berners-Lee recognized the potential of these appealing ideas used
in hypertext for building an easy-to-use, easy-to-extend, easy-to-access global
information system: the World Wide Web. The real innovation of Tim Berners-
Lee was the combination of three main ingredients to create the world's most
successful distributed information system:

• A standard protocol for retrieving hypertexts and other documents, acces-

sible over any server on the Internet which supports this protocol (HTTP).

• Each information item has a globally unique identifier by which it can be

retrieved/dereferenced (the URI).

• A simple format for creating and laying out human-readable, interlinked

hypertext documents, refined to include the possibility to include graphics,
and extensible to other multimedia formats. (HTML)

These ingredients allowed a global network of interlinked information items
published over the Internet, to grow in a constantly expanding way, with over
9 700 000 000 Web pages indexed by Google alone at the time of writing of
this topic.
The first Web page was created in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee himself on
aCERNserver. 5 The first graphical Web browser, Mosaic (Fig. 2.2), was
developed by the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications)
and entered the market in 1993.
In May 1994, the first International Conference on the World Wide Web
led to the foundation and first meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) later that year, in December. Since then, the W3C has set up many
important standard recommendations (e.g. HTML, XML, RDF, and OWL)
- some of which we shall revisit in the course of this chapter - in the hope of
steering the development of the Web towards its next generation.
In the following section we shall take a closer look at the fundamental
building blocks of the Web.

4 The term “hypertext” itself, though, was coined later in the 1960s by another IT
pioneer, Ted Nelson, in the Xanadu project.
5 A copy of this page is still available at
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/
TheProject.html .