Mosaic is more than a GUI for navigating the Internet; it's also a tool for doing business on the World Wide Web
John R. Vacca
It's easy to get tangled up in the Internet: Finding information can take too long. Servers might be down. Connections mysteriously croak. You have to know which vendors and collections to search, as well as the specific query language for the system. You have to be careful while formulating your query. You sometimes have to look through too many hits, which are not sorted in order of relevance. You are working under pressure while paying for connection time. And it's hard to avoid distractions--scrolling through the Simpsons newsgroup instead of tracking down those files on new object management technologies, for instance.
Nevertheless, the Internet provides access
to a worldwide collection of information resources and services. But for a new user, it can be confusing. Navigating the network can be an exercise in frustration for even the most ambitious networker.
Fortunately, software is available that can help. Many users are turning to the Mosaic program--some estimate its usage at 1 million. This browsing software gives you a graphical interface for navigating the Internet. It's probably the most popular means of wending through the WWW (World Wide Web)--that hyperlinked cornucopia of information resources. But Mosaic is more than an easy-to-learn GUI for net surfing. It can also be a tool for publishing information on the WWW.
Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as an Internet-based, global, hypermedia browser. It allows you to hunt for, retrieve, and display documents and data from all over the Internet. It's a window on the ever-expanding world of on-line inf
ormation.
As a hypermedia browser designed for searching and retrieving, Mosaic provides a unified interface to the diverse protocols, data formats, and information archives used on the Internet. Mosaic draws these disparate pieces into a seamless picture that you can view with relative ease. Once you've located a publisher's home page--the screen of the
National Institute of Standards and Technology's home page
is a good example--you just click on a table-of-contents-like listing to jump to the information you want.
With Mosaic's hypermedia-based interface, hyperlinks are embedded in richly formatted documents that can include color images and sounds. "Mosaic provides the mechanisms for linking text, sound, images, and animations," says Leslie Southern of Ohio Supercomputer Center User Services (Columbus, OH). "Our server links to other servers with common interests. While some servers are implemented in an outline format, we have gone to great lengths to integrate the inf
ormation in our server."
At the Ohio Supercomputer Center, for example, the system is set up so you can browse through information on the center's computing facilities. Calendar items, center initiatives, and news releases are closely interconnected, so users can retrieve associated information from any direction. Links are also used to correspond to the level of detail provided.
Furthermore, the interface allows all information located around the world to be interconnected in an environment that permits users to travel through the information by clicking on hyperlinks. "You can move around within complex documents, as well as from document to document across the network, simply by clicking on these hyperlinks," explains Frank Baker, a member of The National Center for Supercomputing Applications' Mosaic development team. You use the same interface for both navigation and document viewing; you can even retrieve information from Gopher, a versatile menu-driven information system, or from WAIS (Wi
de Area Information Service) or anonymous FTP (file transfer protocol) servers without moving to a different application for each one, Baker adds. Mosaic lets you use a consistent, graphical interface with these hard-to-use Internet tools.
The Mosaic interface is based on the idea of hypermedia, where electronic links--known as hyperlinks--are embedded in richly formatted documents that can include full-color images and sound. These documents are presented to users as pages in an interactive, scrollable, on-line book (see the
screen of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
document for an example).
You can take advantage of the full-text and index-based search tools provided by WAIS to locate a particular document. As development continues, the system's flexible design allows other information and data resources, such as relational databases, to be integrated into the Mosaic environment.
Mosaic and WWW
Mosaic is part of the WWW environment--a system for
maintaining distributed hypertext that originated at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (known as CERN) in Geneva. Initially developed to keep track of researchers' information and to provide scientists with an easy method of sharing data, the WWW is growing into one of the world's most widely used environments for information publishing.
To access the information stored in WWW repositories, you must use a client or a browser. "Mosaic is one of the most popular browsers," says Craig Schlenoff, an information technology manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Gaithersburg, MD). Because of its hypertext approach, Mosaic makes following references as easy as turning a page, Schlenoff says. "This allows readers to escape from the sequential organization of pages and pursue topics that interest them."
This ease of moving around the Internet is one reason why Sun Microsystems (Mountain View, CA) put its information on a WWW server. "As you know, the World Wide Web is
explosive--more than one Web server a day [is] being added onto the net," explains George Paolini, a network manager for Sun. "We see the Web as a way to communicate many things about our company: product information, service information, marketing our viewpoint, and so on. The Web technology allows us, for example, to include URLs [uniform resource locators] in our product ads and gives us a place where people can get more information distributed."
Building on WWW's initial structures, Mosaic uses a client/server model for information distribution. A server sits on a machine at an Internet site and answers queries sent by Mosaic clients, who can be located anywhere on the Internet. To a user, the client looks like any other machine application, except it has immediate access to information located all over the world.
These pieces of distributed information that are sent from servers to clients are known simply as documents. These documents, available through Mosaic, describe how to navigate thr
ough the WWW. Separate documentation exists for each of the three available Mosaic versions. Information about all three versions is also available on-line through the Mosaic entry page.
Clicking Through History
A Mosaic hyperlink is designated by underlined text, which indicates that a link to another document exists. To view an attached document, you click on the underlined text. Mosaic maintains a history window on every document that you view (
see the screen
). Clicking on the Back and Forward buttons lets you travel forward and backward through the window's history.
Clicking on the history window itself displays the list of documents you have viewed. Double-clicking on any document title takes you to that document. The first document on the list is the aforementioned home page--the document you see when you first enter Mosaic. Clicking on either the Home or Home Document button automatically takes you to this document.
Ohio State Univ
ersity, located in Columbus, uses its home page as an on-line public faculty/staff directory. "This page contains only text, but it is quite useful for looking up people in the college," says system administrator Kurtis Lindemann. "Within the next couple of months, there will also be a private version of the faculty/staff directory that has pictures, voice annotations, movies, links, and whatever else each faculty member would like his or her home page to look like."
Mosaic as a Commercial Tool
Long viewed as a refuge for academics, researchers, and hackers, the Internet has taken a significant step toward becoming a national electronic marketplace with a new high-speed business-to-business network called CommerceNet. Backed by Silicon Valley companies such as Amdahl, Apple, Intel, National Semiconductor, and Sun, the CommerceNet network has embraced Mosaic to help it achieve its niche in the commercial electronic marketplace.
CommerceNet permits Internet-connected compani
es and individuals to buy and sell goods by using Mosaic as an interface to look up and exchange information, as well as to collaborate on engineering and other projects. Backed by $24 million in federal government and industry financing, it is one of the first significant efforts to bolster the Internet by providing more robust software with the security features needed for electronic commercial transactions. "Buyers and sellers can now meet on the network and trust each other," says Jay Tenenbaum, chairman and founder of Enterprise Integration Technologies (Palo Alto, CA), one of the developers of CommerceNet.
One company currently demonstrating its wares in this new electronic shopping center is the Internet Shopping Network, based in Menlo Park, California. Referring to itself as the "toy store of the global village," the Internet Shopping Network is competing with the giant computer superstore chains by connecting buyers directly to distributors via a Mosaic interface.
Open to anyone on the
Internet, CommerceNet takes advantage of Mosaic's ability to act as an information-retrieval and browsing system. And CommerceNet developers are adding both data-coding and digital-signature technology to Mosaic's capabilities. "That will make it possible for users to conduct business transactions without fear of fraud or theft," Tenenbaum claims.
CommerceNet's coding technology is made possible by an agreement between CommerceNet and RSA Data Security (Redwood City, CA). This agreement will make it possible to develop and distribute secure versions of Mosaic that will communicate with special information-server computers.
Authoring Systems
In today's information systems, there are "islands of information" from which it is difficult to access anyone else's data in a uniform manner. For example, you must use the Dow Jones interface to search Dow Jones for a financial analyst report, and you need the Dialog interface to search a database there. Even within a single vendor's
informaton repository, the tools are difficult to use.
Users want one easy-to-use program to provide uniform access to all data, whether it's from private, corporate, or commercial sources. And information providers need tools for setting up their data repositories. This is what authoring systems with a Mosaic interface are all about. Two such systems, from InfoSeek and Quarterdeck, are new to the market.
InfoSeek has established a commercial Internet search service that interfaces with Mosaic. It's compatible with existing Internet end-user tools and protocols. It enables Unix, PC, and Macintosh users to use Mosaic as a common user interface and perform an easy point-and-click operation to browse, search, and retrieve information.
By late 1995, in addition to offering the basic Mosaic search service, "we will also be providing our advanced Mosaic search software and Internet server software to anyone who wants to make their information accessible over the Internet for either commercial
or noncommercial use," says Steve Kirsch, president and CEO of InfoSeek. "This will expand the network of information sources available to all InfoSeek subscribers. InfoSeek Mosaic CUI (common user interface) software will hide the complexity of where the data is located and which protocols were used to retrieve the information."
InfoSeek says it has applied for patents on two approaches for finding information with Mosaic. One is a method for immediately identifying which information collection(s) are relevant to a user's query, thus saving the user from having to know where to search. The other is a method for combining the results of searches from different collections in a way that properly merges the relevance rankings, regardless of the underlying search-engine technologies. Solving these problems, Kirsch says, is necessary to truly provide total access to global information resources.
Quarterdeck Office Systems plans to bring its commercial version of Mosaic and publishing tools to market
in 1995. Company officials say their planned enhancements include faster performance, multimedia viewers, and an improved user interface compared to current versions of Mosaic.
Quarterdeck will target two major market segments. SOHO (small office/home office) and individual users will use the basic package for Internet navigation and document viewing. These users will find it easy to capture information from any Internet node without the expert knowledge of computer commands that's required by other interface options, Quarterdeck officials say. Corporate and Fortune 500 accounts will use the advanced Mosaic tools for development of multisite information systems.
Lowering the Cost of Global Communications
Consider this: Using traditional technology, a direct mailing or faxing to 1200 customers in the U.S. alone costs between $1200 and $1600. The same coverage with a global communications link costs only about $10. Add another 600 customers in six different countries, and
the cost is still about $10. Using Mosaic for global communications could lower the cost of doing business around the world.
Ellery Systems provides a Mosaic interface with its Global Commerce Link services, which are focused on providing cost-effective Internet communications services to businesses worldwide--especially SOHO users, independent consultants, and telecommuters. GCL gives users on-line offices that put their small businesses on the global commerce map.
GCL has the potential to advertise a business to millions of customers, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. More important, GCL allows a company with a Mosaic interface to quickly and efficiently serve its customers with automated responses to information requests, automated price-quotation services, globe-spanning E-mail capability, and more.
Being able to use Mosaic to instantly communicate current product information to customers and sale forces around the world can give a company a huge advantage over competing firms. Also,
being able to automate same-day responses to customer inquiries and requests for quotes is an enormous advantage over competitors who don't have Mosaic--and who must rely on delivery services that can take days or even weeks to deliver information.
In short, GCL packages the communications power of Mosaic for a business. GCL services start by preparing colorful, graphical information about a business, which is then displayed on the Internet. Automated information, ordering and fulfillment services, customer mailing and list management, electronic-document creation, and document archiving are just a few of the services that GCL offers.
Evolving Mosaic
In the next few years, the commercial Internet evolution--of which Mosaic is a part--will put adventurous businesses on the global information highway. With immediate presence on the WWW, a business will be able to differentiate itself from its competitors by acting as a resource for millions of Internet users located around
the world.
For people who have an Internet connection--and a considerable degree of patience--searching through the WWW is the best way to find answers to many questions. I used Mosaic to do much of the research for this article. The pointers I've included should help you on your way around the WWW.
Coming Attractions
Some of the services that users can expect to appear during the next
stages of the commercial Internet evolution include the following:
-- Company and service information with graphical impact.
-- Listings and personal addresses on the WWW on-line service directory.
-- Automated E-mail and fax forwarding that provide immediate response
to customer-requested information.
-- E-mail list management and distribution.
-- File transfer and archive services.
-- Multiple hyperlinked pages describing products and services connected
to business information and support services.
-- Complete Internet connectivity and maintenance services, from simple
di
al-up to high-bandwidth direct connections.
For More Information
Ellery Systems, Inc.
4840 Pearl East Cir.,
Suite 301-W
Boulder, CO 80301
(303) 443-8414
fax: (303) 443-5865
InfoSeek
2620 Augustine Dr.,
Suite 250
Santa Clara, CA 95054
(408) 982-4463
fax: (408) 986-1889
Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Inc.
1200 Washington Ave. S
Minneapolis, MN 55415
(612) 337-3501
fax: (612) 337-3400
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 244-3364
fax: (217) 244-1099
National Information Infrastructure Test-Bed
Fairfax, VA 22021
(703) 757-7630
fax: (703) 757-0850
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Commerce Department
Gaithersburg, MD 20899
(301) 975-4427
fax: (301) 258-9749
Ohio State University
College of Business
1775 College Rd.,Suite 20899
Columbus, OH 4321
0
(614) 292-9754
fax: (614) 292-1651
Ohio Supercomputer Center
1224 Kinnear Rd.
Columbus, OH 43210
(614) 292-9367
fax: (614) 292-7168
Quarterdeck Office Systems, Inc.
150 Pico Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90405
(310) 392-9851
fax: (310) 314-4218
RSA Data Security, Inc.
100 Marine Pkwy.
Redwood City, CA 94061
(415) 595-8782
fax: (415) 595-1873
Sandia National Labs
20449 East Kirkland AFB
Albuquerque, NM 87185
(505) 844-7192
fax: (505) 844-8480
illustration_link (37 Kbytes)
One of Mosaic's nifty navigation tools is the history window, which lists the available documents relating to a certain subject. By double-clicking on the name of the file, you can jump to that document and view it.
illustration_link (23 Kbytes)
A typical stop on the data highway known as the WWW. This page is from a document about Jupiter, published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
illustration_link (40 Kbytes)
The home page of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. By clicking on underlined text, you can jump to the information linked to the corresponding line in the table of contents.
John R. Vacca is a freelance writer based in Houston who covers information technology. You can contact him on the Internet at
74044.164@compuserve.com
or on BIX c/o "editors."
Mosaic: Beyond Net Surfing
