----------------------------Original message---------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. * * *