This course uses the GLY1073 Electronic Tutor Web site to provide you with links to instructional material and course information, such as announcements and grades.
The World Wide Web has been described as "the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge". This vast universe is accessed using a computer program called a browser. Browsers allow users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer are examples of graphical browsers. Within the text are highlighted phrases called hyperlinks. The hyperlinks are displayed in color or underlined. When you click on the link with the mouse the browser will take you to another document. Following the links may take you to another network site, perhaps quite distant from your original destination.
The Web is unique in that rather than attempting to impose standards on the hardware or the software, the developers defined standards for the data. They also created a universal addressing system. Using the new addressing system - text, picture,sound, or video data - can be retrieved and viewed. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the address of a document on the World Wide Web. The real heart of the World Wide Web is the data standard and the addressing system.
Learn about the history and background of the Web by clicking on About the World Wide Web.
It is not much of an exaggeration to equate the Web with all human knowledge. In 1998 the Web contained somewhere between 30 million and 50 million pages and it was growing by 20 percent every month. By the end of 1998, the Web contained more words than the current Library of Congress (roughly 29 terabytes). The Web now has more than a billion pages. Within two years, the Web may grow to 100 billion pages.
The most popular sites on the Web today are those - like Lycos, Yahoo, and InfoSeek - that attempt to exert some kind of order on an otherwise anarchic collection of information.
Two basic types of tools have been developed for locating resources on the Internet. The basic categories are:
Check out the complete listing of search engines at "Search Engine Colussus"
You can download a pdf version of the Net Scout Sidekicks
Portions of this section of the exercise were adapted from: "Navigating the Internet / Internet Jewels : Where They Are, How to Find Them" by Denise Bennett ** University of Florida - Marston Science Library ** denbenn@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu *
With millions of pages on the Web, how do you sort out the good from the bad, the useful ones from the time-wasters? Many Internet resources include a statement of responsibility at the bottom, stating the author's name, affiliation, and contact information as well as the date of creation/update. Many other resources do not indicate the credentials of the author. Judging the validity of information retrieved from the Internet remains a challenge.
Check out any of these recent articles by librarians and other information specialists for expert guidance and helpful tips:
Study the on-line Introduction to Earth System Science. Click on each of the buttons to hyperlink to the modules about each of Earth's spheres, or subsystems.
Visit Earth System Science On-line, click on "What is ESS" and explore various definitions of ESS.
Learn about "Systems Theory" and "Cybernetics" and think about how it applies to the Earth.
Hypertext is a word coined by Ted Nelson to describe a seamless world of information, in which any part of any document can be linked to any part of any other document.
The Web browser is a computer program that retrieves and interprets documents on the World Wide Web. Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer are browsers that offer a graphical user interface. Lynx is a popular text-only browser.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the high-level programming language in which World Wide Web documents are written.
The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of a document on the World Wide Web.
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This page was last modified on 23 August 2000.