[WEB4LIB] next big thing?

[Robert Tiess]

"Drew, Bill" wrote:
> What will be the next "big thing" in information delivery that librarians
> should watch out for?  I am thinking in terms of things of such import as
> the World Wide Web and gopher.  Both changed how we deliver information.

XML would be a candidate, since it changes how
information can be stored, retrieved, converted,
transferred, and "understood" by computers.
XML is great not only for its markup potential
but also for its related technologies, such as
XLink ("create and describe links between
resources" <http://www.w3.org/XML/Linking>)
and XPointer <http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr>,
which facilitates deep parsing of and linkage
to specific XML data structures (imagine
anchor-type linkage/data extraction).  Or put
it this way:  What MARC did for libraries, XML
can do for the web plus more.  Tim Berners-Lee
takes the XML revolution several steps further
in his grand vision of the "Semantic Web":

Semantic Web: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
Related article: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/xml2000/timbl.html

Robert

rjtiess at warwick.net
http://rtiess.tripod.com
http://rtiess.tripod.com/xmlsites.htm