Computer Science

Modeling the Internet and the Web

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Since its early ARPANET inception during the Cold War, the Internet has grown by a staggering nine orders of magnitude. Today, the Internet and the World Wide Web pervade our lives, having fundamentally altered the way we seek, exchange, distribute, and process information. The Internet has become a powerful social force, transforming communication, entertainment, commerce, politics, medicine, science, and more. It mediates an ever growing fraction of human knowledge, forming both the largest library and the largest marketplace on planet Earth. Unlike the invention of earlier media such as the press, photography, or even the radio, which created specialized passive media, the Internet and the Web impact all information, converting it to a uniform digital format of bits and packets. In addition, the Internet and the Web form a dynamic medium, allowing software applications to control, search, modify, and filter information without human intervention. For example, email messages can carry programs that affect the behavior of the receiving computer.Thisactivemediumalsopromoteshumaninterventioninsharing,updating, linking, embellishing, critiquing, corrupting, etc., information to a degree that far exceeds what could be achieved with printed documents. In common usage, the words ‘Internet’and ‘Web’(or World Wide Web or WWW) are often used interchangeably. Although they are intimately related, there are of course some nuances which we have tried to respect. ‘Internet’, in particular, is the moregeneraltermandimplicitlyincludesphysicalaspectsoftheunderlyingnetworks as well as mechanisms such as email and peer-to-peer activities that are not directly associated with the Web. The term ‘Web’, on the other hand, is associated with the information stored and available on the Internet. It is also a term that points to other complexnetworksofinformation,suchaswebsofscientificcitations,socialrelations, or even protein interactions. In this sense, it is fair to say that a predominant fraction ofourbookisabouttheWebandtheinformationaspectsoftheInternet.Weuse‘Web’ every time we refer to the World Wide Web and ‘web’ when we refer to a broader class of networks or other kinds of networks, i.e. web of citations.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Modeling the Internet and the Web

Call Number

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Publisher

New Jersey : JOHN WILEY & SONS, LTD., 2003

Collation

1-306

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0-470-84906-1

Classification

NONE

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

-

Edition

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Subject(s)

Modeling the Internet and the Web

Specific Detail Info

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