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The corporate world is turning out data at a dizzying rate. News reports, financial transactions and government regulations are clogging the system. The Internet, the latest mover of information, thanks to the creation of The World Wide Web or simply "The Web", now contains over 40,000,000 pages of "stuff" ranging from personal hobby pages to the latest Tax Revisions. How do you find anything in this deluge? How does one shout one’s message above the din? With so much to look at there is now a definite "Visibility Factor" to information.

In corporate settings, getting at information is made easier by the presence of information controllers. Management sets policy on who gets to see what, of the company databases, and librarians and information systems personnel see to it that the right people do. They filter content and they construct the infrastructure that lets digital bits move about their business. This requires that the organization be tied together in some physical network. With the recent creation of high speed transmission lines and switches together with the writing of sophisticated software that interprets data irrelevant of source and throws it onto the appropriate desktop screens, companies are now fashioning internal networks or Intranets, capable of handling the divergent corporate needs of dissemination and access control.

As a result of these and other developments, companies are more and more speaking of telecommuting for their staff. The idea is to save the movement of personnel between increasingly outdated facilities far removed from where employees live. Instead of having an employee spend an hour each way in a vehicle (which often is paid for by the employer as part of a state-enforced car pool effort), why not leave the employee at home with a computer and a high speed link to a central computer core from which he or she can work just as effectively. The infrastructure is more or less in place to do this in most urban areas so the costs are not unrealistic to implement. What is needed in addition, however, is an information infrastructure. A system which allows information to be made available to anyone on the system that needs access. Such systems are becoming easier to create thanks to the development of new software and hardware components that work together to allow high speed transmission of secure data.

In contrast, in the public setting of the Web, there is no central authority to decide who sees what and no central authority to create the interconnected information structure tying data together in a sensible way. In fact, the Internet was deliberately designed to bypass such control. Bits are loaded onto the ether in total disregard of order. Today, anyone with access to a home computer, a phone, some easy to obtain software and an account with one of the thousands of access providers, can get a message onto the Internet. Sometimes it seems as if everyone is trying.

In response to the overwhelming content on the Web, and the need for some sort of order, people began organizing the information. Web sites like Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) were early pioneers in that they began to index interesting sites and organize them loosely by subject matter. The resulting list was made available freely to anyone who visited their web site. However, even with a highly determined effort, as the site numbers soared past the million mark, even they could barely keep up with the explosion of new pages on the Web.

Another approach involved letting software do the walking, with the creation of software spiders, which quietly passed through millions of pages on the Web, noting addresses and creating directories of pages based on keywords gleaned from the text on the pages themselves (see http://www.webcrawler.com and http://www.excite.com for examples). This approach also, had its severe limitations. A single keyword could easily appear on thousands of pages. Which site was the important one? Many pages had few keywords – they were graphically oriented, for example, and had great pictures describing the site but little or no text. These sites totally disappeared into the background.

Other people wrote programs, essentially private spiders, to scour the Internet based on user specified queries – usually keywords (see http://www.firstfloor.com and http://www.quarterdeck.com for examples). These allowed a researcher to refine the search until the right pages popped up onto the screen. No small task for someone on the run to the next meeting.

The latest trend dealing with the "Visibility Factor" has been the appearance of "Second Generation" web sites. These sites do not add to the mess by creating fresh content. Instead they collate. They spend their resources looking through the Web for the important sites and information and they centralize it all in one easy to access spot for a group of readers. By doing the job once, they save having everyone else with the same goals repeating identical tasks a multitude of times. Each of these sites generally aims at a very specific audience although as a group they cover a wide range of interests. People looking for weather reports have a site (http://www.weather.com) as do readers of soap operas (http://www.primenet.com/~plntsoap/). Computer buffs go to (http://www.cnet.com) while biologists can go to (http://www.sciweb.com).

The creation of second generation web sites, represents an organizational breakthrough for the independent work force. Cut off from the traditional corporate work shell and going it alone as consultants to their relevant industries, these people generally run small ventures out of tiny offices or their homes, communicating with clients and colleagues with computers and leased lines on the Internet. This entire group is as tied to the need to access high quality information and services as any corporate employee, yet have none of the infrastructure available to them as independents.

Central web sites, provide these professionals with services that are increasingly required, to maintain an efficient environment in which they can do business. Business, in this context, is more than just information. Central sites can also provide electronic tools for their readers. These include gateways to access software archives, chat rooms for online conferencing, e-mail-based group mailing lists, bulletin boards for electronic information exchange. New tools are being developed that will convert these early efforts into sophisticated communication centers aimed at servicing groups with common interests. These include: the possibility of real time audio and video conferencing centers with shared workspaces; creation of regional databases of interest to the group, tied to each other through common reference links; tailored information services delivered directly into each reader’s electronic mailbox – including news reports, analysts surveys, industry breakthroughs and gossip, all prescreened for the reader’s preferences. These sites can act as information clearinghouses for industry information (for example, collection centers for company press releases or new product announcements) and they can provide facilities for online commerce, such as catalog sales. Ultimately, these sites will become online office centers in which professionals will work more productively.

The impetus for change in how we deal with information is very high. With markets and resources and competition becoming more global, access to high quality information and communication services is becoming a must for any business professional trying to stay up with the pack. Having available, a service that provides pre-selected content and a set of advanced tools for interactivity at reasonable cost, will be a life saver for anyone who is trying to make sense of the vast amounts of data floating around the ether on the Internet or private networks.

Just as in the Biblical Deluge, saving oneself required access to a well organized vessel containing the select resources to start the next generation, finding oneself through the modern deluge will require access to a well organized information filtering resource able to carry one through to the next project.

Dr. Edward Jakobovits is President of SciWeb Inc., (http://www.sciweb.com), an Internet-based information and communication service for life science professionals. He received his Ph.D. in Genetics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel. He was a post doctoral fellow with Dr. Harold Varmus in the University of California at San Francisco and then moved to Genentech for a post doctoral term with Dr. Arthur Levinson. He worked as the head of the Molecular Biology Group in Neurex Corp. in Menlo Park before moving to the Research Department at Syva Co., the diagnostic wing of Syntex Corp. before it was sold to Behring Diagnostics.