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Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed a data management system as a project to CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) 35 years ago, in March 1989 (Berners Lee, 1989). He had in mind a practical problem: a great deal of helpful data and analysis of experimental results resided on the computers of different scientists but remained inaccessible to others. His experience with a NeXT computer and its support for the HyperCard system connecting and linking different files on his own machine suggested to him that something similar should be possible across the computer network used at CERN (Berners-Lee & Fischetti, 1999). The computer networks already included the protocols to identify machines and to send emails and even files (vial FTP, for example). Could people identify and link files on remote systems for easy access, as easy as clicking a link in a HyperCard stack? As we well know now, his theoretical and practical work on this project led to the World Wide Web. Such things take time and, in the case of the World Wide Web, it took about five years of development work and the addition of many features to move close to what we now recognize as the Web (MIT, 1994). But in Berners-Lee's mind, "The Web was not a physical 'thing' that existed in a certain 'place.' It was a 'space' in which information could exist" (Berners-Lee & Fischetti, 1999, p. 36).
Though Berners-Lee's problem wrestled with new communication systems, the idea of data management had existed along with every communication medium. Oral cultures arranged and recalled their essential knowledge through narratives, mnemonics, and memory systems (Ong, 1982; Yates, 1966). People decorated texts written on scrolls and parchments to aid finding materials inscribed on those pages (Minneapolis, n.d.). The invention of the printing press led to news ways to manage the information of standardized pages, from indices to page layouts (Eisenstein, 1979; Ong, 1982). Peter Ramus (Ong, 1958) proposed whole news ways of envisioning data and of teaching students formerly immersed in classical rhetorical systems. Though writing-based systems of information management took on a universal utility, such management became necessary in each new medium: we struggle with recalling and finding things in newspapers, films, television, musical recordings, and even telephone systems (Bory, Benecchi,...