The World Wide Web: a review of an emerging internet-based technology for the distribution of biomedical information.
The Internet is rapidly evolving from a resource used primarily by the research community to a true global information network offering a wide range of databases and services. This evolution presents many opportunities for improved access to biomedical information, but Internet-based resources have often been difficult for the non-expert to develop and use. The World Wide Web (WWW) supports an inexpensive, easy-to-use, cross-platform, graphic interface to the Internet that may radically alter the way we retrieve and disseminate medical data. This paper summarizes the Internet and hypertext origins of the WWW, reviews WWW-specific technologies, and describes current and future applications of this technology in medicine and medical informatics. The paper also includes an appendix of useful biomedical WWW servers.
Lowe
H J
HJ
Section of Medical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Lomax
E C
EC
Polonkey
S E
SE
D003195:Computer Communication Networks / Q000458:organization & administration; D003196:Computer Graphics; D016494:Computer Security; D007255:Information Services; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D014584:User-Computer Interface