A web that understands you

Abstract

The World Wide Web has been as influential in the exponential growth of content as the invention of the printing press. The Web is, after all, essentially a (digital) publishing tool. And like the printing press, the Web is a disruptive technology. Web technology, spanning the protocols that govern distribution, the languages that facilitate publication and the applications that process, link and display content, is shaping social, academic and commercial communications - and having a profound affect on enterprise technology use. The more communications are conducted based on Web technology, the more complexity is introduced to enterprise IT infrastructures. The Web's significance can be judged by its volume alone. Analyst firm IDC recently published research that found 161 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of new digital information was created last year alone: that is 12 stacks of books, each extending more than 93 million miles from the earth to the sun. IDC predicts a six-fold annual increase in information created through media and data such as video, work files, emails and instant messages between 2006 and 2010, surging more than six-fold to 988 exabytes and creating a compound annual growth rate of 57 per cent by the end of this period. A report sponsored by storage vendor EMC found that, although individuals will generate nearly 70 per cent of this digital content, organisations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85 per cent of the data. Given this startling statistic, the work of Web researchers, developers and academics should be seen in the context of facilitating a move to the next generation of communication technology at an organisational level.