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Information Control on the Internet2

© Adam Hughes

As Al Gore would probably be quick to point out, today's Internet is a virtual cornucopia of information on just about any subject that could be imagined. But while the "Information Superhighway" has undoubtedly changed our lives forever, locating the exact material you need can often leave your head spinning as you weed through mounds of related web sites. What's more, reliablility and performace problems can deposit you right into the "Information Rush-Hour Traffic Jam." Clearly, there are improvements that can be made to this aspect of the young internet, and that is one of the primary objective's of the Internet2 project.

One of the major enhancements that Internet2 will bring to networking will be increased bandwidth and application-specific bandwidth reservation. This will allow users to see a great increase in interactive performance. One of the anticipated benefits of this development will be that continuous digital audio and video will be routinely and reliably served to users over the network. This could have important ramifications in several areas, but in general, the impact should be in helping to move the internet away from its current position of being a text-dominated domain. With the availability of robust audio-visual techniques, sharing concepts among geographically- distributed collaborators should be easier than ever, and the internet will help foster its own development.

Existing information retrieval and management systems are also based largely on text-driven technologies. As anyone who has performed even a few web searches can attest, though, there is often so much information returned that it's nearly impossible to wade through it all. Man is a conceptual being who can't readily receive and process a great number of concrete examples at one time. We form generalizations in our minds that allow us to work through what's before us without shutting down completely. This is why visualization is so important in the sciences : if we just look at the real data related to a physical system, it's nearly impossible for us to draw a meaningful conclusion. But shape that data into an overall graphic, and we make important observations. In much the same way, Internet2 should allow he internet researcher to implement techniques which will put a graphical, or conceptual, handle on the information he seeks and must manipulate. The result should be a much more fruitful data mining landscape.

Finally, the increased bandwidth and reliability planned under the auspices of the Internet2 hold great promise for improving the ability to multicast information to the appropriate audiences. Much work has been done on this front already, but there are

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