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EUROPA SERVER
The European Commission has opened a new server on the Internet. Its name
is EUROPA and it will provide people in Europe and elsewhere with clear,
comprehensive and up-to-date information on the objectives, institutions
and policies of the European Union. This initiative is being launched on
the eve of the Brussels meeting of G7 ministers on 25 and 26 February as
part of the drive towards an information society.
EUROPA is a pilot scheme developed by the Directorate-General for
Information, Communication, Culture and Audiovisual Media under the
responsibility of Marcelino Oreja, Member of the Commission, and in
cooperation with the Computing Centre, the Spokesman's Service and the
information departments of various Directorates-General.
The data available on EUROPA make it an interesting source of information
for ordinary Europeans, whether accessed directly or indirectly through
various information relays and networks.
The Commission has already launched other WWW servers and there are more
in the pipeline. For example, the "I'M EUROPE" server came on line on
1 September 1994, at the prompting of DG XIII, for the purpose of
organizing initiatives on the information market, while the Information
Society Project Office (ISPO), set up by the Commission under its action
programme to establish an information society in Europe, is responsible
for another server designed to support, promote and direct private and
public measures in that field.
At its launch EUROPA contained:
* general information on the European Union (its institutions, history
and questions and answers on topics of general interest);
* data on the European Commission (its tasks, composition, speeches by
the President, organizational structure, a document access guide);
* recent documents from the Spokesman's Service (RAPID);
* a directory of European Union policies, with access to information
from the Directorates-General aimed at the general public;
* information on and access to Commission databases (I'M EUROPE, ISPO,
CORDIS, EUROBASES, EUROSTAT, EUR-OP, etc.).
EUROPA's stock of information will grow rapidly. Its address is:
http://www.cec.lu.
The Internet has existed for more than twenty years. It was originally
designed to link up the computers of the Pentagon's research centres. In
the early 1980s, the United States decided to separate the military
programmes entirely from the non-military ones and leave the Internet to
the latter, thereby paving the way for an entirely new network linking
research centres all over the world.
The present explosion in the number of servers and users is a result of
two recent and spectacular developments. The first was the concept of the
World Wide Web, which was developed by a European researcher at CERN, Tim
Berners-Lee, and led to the pooling of computing resources, the definition
of the Universal Resource Locator, which identifies each server and user
and makes them accessible, and finally the definition of the Hypertext
language. The second development came in 1992 when a student at the
University of Illinois, Marc Andriessen, put the finishing touches to a
software package that enables anyone with a computer and a modem to
navigate easily from one corner of the planet to another and to receive
documents, images and sounds at a modest price.
Although most of the users and servers are still in the United States, the
World Wide Web deserves its name, as it is spreading throughout the world,
particularly Europe, at a phenomenal rate. In France, the home of the
Minitel, Internet traffic is growing by 15% a month. In Germany, Denmark,
Sweden, Italy and Spain each university has set up its own server. Many
other initiatives aimed at informing the public have sprung up outside the
academic world. In the United Kingdom the government is testing its own
servers, and local authorities in the Netherlands are doing the same.
Meanwhile, we can expect an exponential growth in the number of users.
The decision to launch the Commission's WWW servers is clearly warranted
by their userfriendliness, their capacity to deal with different forms of
information and open up access to databases and, finally, their great
potential for interactivity.
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