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on Xanadu and connectivity of web..


Connectivity of the web:
----------------------- 

First a question that you can ponder over..

I mentioned that one of the headaches brought on by the web  to the
text retrieval community is that unlike text documents, hypertext
documents point to each other, and that often a lot of meaning lies
in these interconnections. (For example, it has been pointed out that
the word "browser" doesn't appear on the netscape.com's main webpage
at all. So, if you do simple text search on browser, netscape's main
page will not be returned...)

A seemingly silly question in this context is just how "connected" the 
web really is. Suppose you choose two random pages A and B on the big
bad web. What is the probability that there is a path from A to B
(i.e., you can click a series of links starting at A and eventually
reach B). More to the point do you think it is more or less than .5? 
(You can look for the correct answer based on a large scale study of
the web as of 1999 end at the following link--which also tell you why
we can think of the web as a "bow-tie"):

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/290635.html
(at the page you need to select pdf or postscript or image version at
the page).

A more chatty but a bit outdated "newspaper" style answer can be found at 

http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb000522-1.htm#bowtie

Xanadu:
-------

I mentioned Xanadu and forgot the guy behind it. Ted Nelson is the man 
who started Xanadu project, which is considered the original hypertext 
project (started in 1960--way before arpanet ;-). His vision of
hypertext was much more sophisticated than the one that we have now,
but his vision stayed at the vision level unfortunately. Project
Xanadu has been called the longest running "vaporware" project in the
history of computer science by less charitable critics.


The following link contains a short history of xanadu project (by
someone other than Ted Nelson)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0155.html

For Nelson's own version of his project, look at 

http://www.xanadu.net


Rao
[Jan 18, 2001]