The origins of the Internet are only partially understood. It is often believed that the Internet grew as a tree from a tiny acorn, the ARPANET network set up in 1969. In this study, we argue that this interpretation is incomplete at best and seriously flawed at worst. Our article makes three contributions. First, on the basis of a wide variety of primary and secondary sources we reconstruct the history of computer networks between the late 1950s and the early 1990s. We show that the ARPANET network was one among a myriad of (commercial and non-commercial) networks that developed over that period of time – the integration of these networks into an internet was likely to happen, whether ARPANET existed or not. Second, we make a systematic effort to quantify the significance of these various networks. This allows us to visualize more clearly the extent to which the ARPANET network was one among many, and not a particularly large one at that. Third, we provide a nuanced interpretation of the rise of various technologies, including the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol and the World Wide Web, as ‘dominant designs.’ Their rise should be interpreted within the economic framework of industries with network effects, in which historical accidents bring about tipping points that lead to universal acceptance. We thus show that history matters for understanding why information systems function in the way they do.

The history of the internet: the missing narratives

Most histories of the Internet, both scholarly and popular, focus on its origins in the ARPANET network built by the U.S. Advanced Projects Research Agency in the late 1960s. In this paper it is shown that the ARPANET was just one of many private and public initiatives that helped shape the Internet of today. For example, the early 1960s saw the deployment of numerous defense networks (such as the $8 billion SAGE program), the first airline reservation systems, and the beginnings of the remote computer services industry. The 1970s saw the development of computerized networks for banks and the rise of the Electronic Data Interchange movement, which established business-to-business communications across many industry sectors. The 1970s also saw the first online information providers, such as Lexis and Dialog, and the first global data communications networks to connect users to these services. With the rise of the personal computer in the 1980s, a vista of computer networking services opened up: the first consumer networks such as CompuServe and Prodigy, the first commercial email services, and Videotext services that became the basis for national information infrastructures in many countries. In the 1990s, the embryonic Internet was popularized by the World Wide Web - a technology that was rooted in information-science research that long predated networked computers.

The History of the Internet: The Missing Narratives

The digitization initiatives in the past decades have led to a tremendous increase in digitized objects in the cultural heritage domain. Although digitally available, these objects are often not easily accessible for interested users because of the distributed allocation of the content in different repositories and the variety in data structure and standards. When users search for cultural content, they first need to identify the specific repository and then need to know how to search within this platform (e.g., usage of specific vocabulary). The goal of the EEXCESS project is to design and implement an infrastructure that enables ubiquitous access to digital cultural heritage content. Cultural content should be made available in the channels that users habitually visit and be tailored to their current context without the need to manually search multiple portals or content repositories. To realize this goal, open-source software components and services have been developed that can either be used as an integrated infrastructure or as modular components suitable to be integrated in other products and services. The EEXCESS modules and components comprise (i) Web-based context detection, (ii) information retrieval-based, federated content aggregation, (iii) metadata definition and mapping, and (iv) a component responsible for privacy preservation. Various applications have been realized based on these components that bring cultural content to the user in content consumption and content creation scenarios. For example, content consumption is realized by a browser extension generating automatic search queries from the current page context and the focus paragraph and presenting related results aggregated from different data providers. A Google Docs add-on allows retrieval of relevant content aggregated from multiple data providers while collaboratively writing a document. These relevant resources then can be included in the current document either as citation, an image, or a link (with preview) without having to leave disrupt the current writing task for an explicit search in various content providers’ portals.

Ubiquitous Access to Digital Cultural Heritage

In the last decade, Europe has put a tremendous effort into making cultural, educational and scientific resources publicly available. Based on national or thematic aggregators, initiatives like Europeana nowadays provide a plethora of cultural resources for people worldwide. Although such massive amounts of rich cultural heritage content are available, the potential of its use for educational and scientific purposes still remains largely untapped. Much valuable content is only available in the so-called long tail, i.e. in niche resources such as specifically themed cultural heritage collections, and are difficult to access from the mainstream hubs like major search engines, social networks or online encyclopaedias. The vision of the EEXCESS project is to push high-quality content from the long tail to platforms and devices which are used every day. The realisation of such use cases requires as a basis (and in addition to the functional components) a common metadata representation and tools for mapping between the data sources' specific data models and this common representation. In this paper, we propose a data model for such a system that combines federated search results from different cultural heritage data sources. We then propose an approach for metadata mapping, with a focus on easy configurability of mappings, which--once properly configured--can then be executed on the fly by an automatic service. We demonstrate the approach using a real-world example.

A metadata model and mapping approach for facilitating access to heterogeneous cultural heritage assets

One of the goals of the MeDoc project is to make computer science literature, e.g. Technical Reports and project master theses of different authors and institutions available online through a single user interface. Therefore, we evaluated existing Technical Report servers as to their suitability as a basis for an electronic library and chose NCSTRL. The Networked Computer Science Technical Report Librart (NCSTRL) is a worldwide, distributed collection of computer science Technical Reports and other relevant materials. It is a well established system, but there are some deficiencies. This paper presents two different enhancements to the NCSTRL system to overcome those deficiencies. The first adapts NCSTRL to support not only the publication of Technical Reports but of other grey literature. The secound extension allows for the utilization of NCSTRL as a general tool for the online publication of and search for electronic documents in multiple collections.

Grey Literature and Multiple Collections in NCSTRL

Audiovisual archives hold enormous amounts of valuable content. However, many of these archives are difficult to access, as their holdings are documented using a range of different metadata formats. Being able to exchange metadata is the key to ensuring access to these collections and to establish interoperability among audiovisual collections, between audiovisual collections and other cultural heritage institutions as well as portals such as Europeana. In this work we attempt to model mappings between metadata formats based on a high-level intermediate concept representation in order to avoid hand-crafted one-to-one mappings between metadata formats. In addition, we define mapping templates on data type level, from which the code for mapping instructions between a pair of formats can be derived. The high-level intermediate concept representation is based on the existing meon ontology and the resulting mapping instructions are expressed using XSLT. As a proof of concept, mappings between two metadata formats are formalized and integrated in a web based prototype application.

Mapping audiovisual metadata formats using formal semantics

WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers), a development of Thinking Machine Corporation, turned out to be one of the main search engines in connection with the World Wide Web (WWW). This article gives a short overview of WAIS, its history, its basics and some connected developments.

WAIS and Information Retrieval on the Internet

This paper discusses some experiences with the development of features based on natural language processing for a multimedia encyclopedia.

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Mapping audiovisual metadata formats using formal semantics

WAIS and Information Retrieval on the Internet

Software for a Multimedia Encyclopedia