The World Wide Web and associated Internet resources have emerged as the largest distributed data repository on earth.

Human knowledge from all over the world resides on the Internet in various digital forms: data sets, web pages, journal articles, digitized books and newspaper articles, blog posts, scanned drawings and paintings, photographs, videos, podcasts, speech transcripts, and numerous other media. How is this information aggregated, indexed, searched, and disseminated? How does this digital content get from a web server in Malawi or Ecuador to an end user at a college or university in the United States, or vice versa? Read more