uesday marked the first day proper of the conference. Breakfast in the conference area started at 7:30 am; 8:25 saw several of the British delegation shuffle in to a near-empty self-service area, mistakenly thinking that most people hadn't yet got out of bed.
As it later emerged, many of the US delegates had been queuing for food since before 7:30, and had now bagged the best seats for the opening plenary session.
Made mental note to in future appreciate the reasurringly late times that conferences in the UK generally start.
Bran works for Disney; despite their reputation for being draconian with anyone using anything even slightly Disney-like in their Web pages, he appeared to be quite a cheerful and fair character, greatly resembling Grizzly Adams in appearance. Bran gave a potted history of technological breakthroughs, showing how the wrong person usually got the credit for inventions. This went on for so long that most people forgot the point he was trying to make (but it was at least entertaining). He described the Web as being like "a project commisioned by the Institute of the aesthetically challenged". Unfortunately, there was little else of relevance in his address, entertaining a speaker though he was.
Dave Beckett from the HENSA Unix Archive presented a paper on IAFA templates in use as Internet Metadata. Beckett is using IAFA templates to index an Internet Parallel Computing Archive at the University of Kent. The archive is a mixture of resources including reports, software, documentation, bibliographies, etc. Originally chose IAFA templates (1993) as they allowed for a much richer range of metadata to be created than other existing standards, e.g. Linux Software Maps. Even so had to create new template types and attributes (field names) to accommodate the different resources in the archive. There is some automatic extraction of metadata from the resources, for example the format of the resource can often be gleaned by looking at the filename extensions e.g. .ps (postscript). However also added hand-written metadata such as descriptions to the templates. Problems encountered using IAFA were difficulties in representing nested metadata and the use of non-ascii characters within the templates. Some future work Beckett set out was to have user configurable views of the templates and provide a URC service based on the templates.
At a later URC bof Dirk Van Gulik presented some information about the European Wide Service Exchange (EWSE). This is a directory service for people, products and services concerned with the application of Earth Observation data. The data is stored in IAFA templates and they are using a harvester to find information. Van Gulik was also interested in providing a URC resolver service.
A panel of the great and the good were brought together to discuss URIs (Uniform Resource Indentifiers). Chaired by Stuart Weibel from the OCLC Office of Research each speaker was given roughly 5 minutes to put forward his/her position on what they thought were the most important issues in this area. This was obviously too short a time for any real discussion to take place but the the overall impression was that URNs and URCs were still a long way from being settled. Some comments from the speakers:
Larry Masinter from XEROX PARC thought that the problem with URLs is not so much that URLs change but that 'stuff goes away'. A naming system won't solve this problem and the preservation of online material is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Karen Sollins from MIT Laboratory for Computer Science put forward a list of characteristics that were required of URNs. They will need to have:
Ron Daniel from LANL put forward a scenario for a hiearchical scheme where the client (browser) would first check the local cache for the resource, if this was not sucessful the client would contact a local resolving registry and the local resolver would in turn contact an outside registry.
evolution of the Web, and what he would like to see in the future. This was probably the most heavily
attended session of the conference, and certainly the one with the largest press and TV contingent.
The section on the early days of the Web were most interesting. Tim preferred HTML before inlined images were introduced (into Mosaic), as it made people more literate. He also noted how the concept of the "home page" had changed. In the early, dark days of the Web (before 1994), the home page was the page where you started to browse around the Web. Since, then, and partially helped by bookmarks being a fundamental feature of most browsers, the home page was now someones the self-publicity Web area.
This presentation produced, for many people, the highlight of the conference. About halfway through, while he was using a demo version of a browser to view his Web pages, the browser licence expired, with an accompanying message on the screen. The ironic situation of the founder of the Web, being unable to access Web pages because of a commercial/licencing software problem, struck home with many people. Several heavily bearded and sandalled delegates in front of us, who appeared to closely resemble stereotypical techno-hippies, commented "like, symbolic, Man...".
all of the delegates and what appeared to be several dozen hotel employees. The food was okay, so long as you weren't vegetarian; meals at the conference tended to have a vegetable/fruit based starter, and if you did not eat meat, you generally got the same again (but as a bigger portion) for the main course.
However, several bottles of wine on each table (most of ours drunk very quickly by 4 CERN employees) and the chance to talk to lots of people on things Web made up for this. The music was provided by an odd jazz combination, the lead singer of which tried (and failed) to get into the "mood" by singing lines like "found myself a URL" and "got myself my Web page". Hmmmm.