INTERNATIONAL CONSERVATION AND THE WORLD WIDE WEB

By Donna FitzRoy Hardy, Ph.D.

International Zoo News Vol. 43/8 (No.273):562-570.
[This paper appears with the permission of Nicholas Gould, Editor of International Zoo News.]


Introduction

The international zoo community is gradually coming to regard the personal computer (PC) as a communication tool, although we might be well into the next century before computers will compete with the telephone, facsimile machine or the post. But electroniccommunications technology is evolving very fast, and since my article on computer-mediated communication appeared in International Zoo Yearbook(Hardy, 1994), the ease with which the user can access computer networks has undergone a revolutionary change. While other applications of the Internet (especially e-mail and Internet Relay Chat) continue to gain popularity, the recent increase in interest in the Internet is attributed to the use of World Wide Web (also referred to as WWW, W3, or simply, 'the Web'). When the above article was written in 1993, the World Wide Web was just another information server that the user could access with a Telnet code, and most of the sites accessible through the Web at that time were institutions and centers for high-energy physics, mathematics or computer science. Today's popularity of the Web is due to features that distinguish it from all other Internet applications that preceded it: hypertext 1 orientation and ability to support hypermedia (graphics, color, sound, motion, etc.). Hypertext has captured the imagination and enthusiasm of the Internet community and nearly all Web documents include hypertext links to other documents. These 'hyperlinks' automatically locate information in computers (called HTTP or Web 'servers') anywhere in the world (Wiggins, 1995).

History of the World Wide Web

While the World Wide Web and the Internet are often thought to be synonymous, the Internet is actually only the physical medium used to transport electronic data. The Web is a collection of computer protocols 2 and standards that computers use to access that data. The three computer standards that define the Web are: Uniform Resources Locators (URLs), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Hypertext Markup Languages (HTML) (Richard, 1995). URLs are the standard means used on the Web in locating Internet documents, and HTTP is the primary computer protocol used to retrieve information via the Web. (Fuller definitions of both terms, and of HTML, are given below.)

The interactivity of this technology has prompted some to dub the World Wide Web as the 'Fourth Media', following print, radio and television as a means of mass-market communication. The First Media originated in about 1450 with the invention of the movable type printing press by Johannes Guttenberg, and print remained the only means of mass communication for more than 450 years. The first radio communication signals were sent in 1895 by Gugliolmo Marconi, although radio technology had to wait until the development of the audion tube by De Forest in 1906 before it could move from dot-dash radio telegraphy to full sound modulation. De Forest's invention set the stage for the Second Media of mass communications, and the first experimental broadcast of the voices of Enrico Caruso and Emmy Dustin took place in 1910. Formal radio broadcasting began on 2 November 1920, with the inauguration of a daily schedule of programs by KDKA-Pittsburgh. The Third Media began with RCA's experimental television broadcast of a Felix the Cat cartoon in 1936, and television use proliferated during the late 1940s. The World Wide Web was made available to Internet users in 1989. But as the Fourth Media, the Web differs considerably from the other three media of mass communication. Whereas print media is dependent upon an editor and the space afforded within a publication, and television and radio are controlled by programmers and the limits of time (contents being delivered in segments), the World Wide Web is not bound by space or time.

Although the original idea that computer systems could allow their users to follow non-linear 3 paths through various documents dates back to the 1940s, the first practical application of a hypertext system was not released until 1987 when the HyperCard package for the Macintosh computer was popularized (Wiggins, 1995). About the same time, a hypertext project was proposed at CERN, the European Particle Physics Institutes in Geneva, Switzerland. Their design document describing how computer documents could be 'interwoven' or blended together contrasted with the hierarchical 4 model used by the Internet Gopher, announced by the University of Minnesota the next year. Soon after its origin in 1989, the World Wide Web gained great popularity among users of the Internet.

Today's widespread use of the World Wide Web is a direct result of the development of functional computer programs called 'browsers.' The first browser, DOSLynx, was developed in early 1992. While it is just a text-only program, it affords access to the Web for people with Pcs not capable of running the Windows program. DOSLynx is available via FTP from the University of Kansas: ftp2.cc.ukans.edu, login as anonymous, enter your e-mail address as the password, then go to the directory for README.TXT. (FTP or File Transfer Protocol is the Internet protocol for transferring files between computers.) By the fall of 1993, the first graphical browser, Mosaic, became available. Today, the most widely used graphical Web browser is Netscape Navigator, for which excellent guides are available (e.g., Minatel, 1995). Graphical browser programs afford easy access to multimedia graphics, audio and video files from anywhere on the Internet, and new applications utilizing the interactivity of the Internet are rapidly being developed.

Uniform Resource Locators

URLs are the standard means used on the Web to locate Internet documents. They provide a simple addressing scheme that unifies a wide variety of dissimilar protocols and can specify FTP file retrieval, locate Usenet Newsgroups and gopher menus, define e-mail addresses, and identify HTTP documents. The typical format of a URL is protocol://server-name:port/path. For retrieving documents on the World Wide Web, the protocol in this format is http. Entering a URL beginning with http:// tells a browser program to look for a computer file on the World Wide Web. The rest of the URL tells the browser exactly where the file is located: the domain (name of the Web server), where in that computer the file is stored, and the name of the file to be retrieved.

One gains access to the World Wide Web by using a PC with a modem and a computer communications program to gain access to the Internet by connecting one's PC (called the 'client') to a server at an online service (e.g., America OnLine, CompuServe, Prodigy) or an Internet service provider (e.g., Netcom, PSINet, UUNet). The user needs to establish a connection that can support a TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), the protocol with which computers exchange information on the Internet. This is usually done with either a SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) or PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) connection to the server. The user will also have to install networking software in the PC, such as Trumpet Winsock or a commercial product such as Internet in a Box (Weiss, 1996). It is highly recommended that the user become familiar with this technology by first reading an introductory book about the Internet, such as the one by Krol (1994) or by Hahn and Stout (1994).] If one's PC is operating in a Windows environment or is a Macintosh, a graphical Web browser program like Netscape Navigator can be used. Once connected to the online service or Internet service provider, the user can gain access to files located in that particular server or in another server anywhere on the Internet, although the actual speed of this access depends upon the speed of the modem and the type of connection to the Web server. A person in Great Britain entering the URL http://www.selu.com/~bio/cauz/ will be retrieving files from a Web server in the United States - in this case, a computer in Seattle, Washington. This is the URL for the Web Site of the Consortium of Aquariums, Universities and Zoos (C.A.U.Z.).

Hypertext Transfer Protocol and Hypertext Markup Language

HTTP is the primary computer protocol used to distribute information across the Internet. It specifies a simple electronic transaction to deliver requested information from a server to a client, and its simplicity permits fast response times. Basically, the transaction involves: (1) the client establishing a connection to the server, (2) the client issuing a request to the server specifying a particular document to be retrieved, (3) the server sending a response containing the text of the document to be retrieved, if it is available, and (4) either the client or the server disconnecting after each request. Since a new connection to the HTTP server must be made each time, this is one reason why it takes so long to load graphics: for each graphic, a separate connection must be established. Newer Web browser programs like Netscape Navigator open multiple connections and receive documents in parallel, so that the user can be reading the text while the graphics are still being received by the client.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is an important innovation associated with the World Wide Web. It is the 'hidden code' - invisible to the person viewing the Web document - that determines how the document will appear to the person who has retrieved it. HTML also provides hypertext links within a document or between documents so that a viewer can easily move from one document to another by clicking a button on a computer mouse when the screen's pointer is on a highlighted part of the text. Many items at the C.A.U.Z. Web Site have been marked in HTML so that they are linked to other documents. While some of these links are files in the same Web server in Seattle, many hypertext links are provided to documents in other servers - many of which are in other cities. For example, the user may read the description of the important Internet resource called ZooNet, and then click on the word ZooNet to 'visit' that Web Site without having to enter its URL. After deciding that ZooNet is a site to visit repeatedly, the user can use the browser program to 'bookmark' this link for direct access later.

Hypertext links form the threads of information that are the structure of the World Wide Web, and Web Sites like the one provided by C.A.U.Z. that offer a broad array of useful hypertext links can serve as convenient 'launching pads' into the Web. (Many of us who are interested in conservation have changed the 'HOME' location of our browser program from its default location - e.g., Netscape Corporation - to the C.A.U.Z. Web Site because it provides easy access into the World Wide Web and its vast resources.) As increasing numbers of people begin to use graphical Web browsers to find documents on the Internet, many of them become interested in creating their own Web documents. Excellent texts, such as The HTML Sourcebook (Graham, 1995), are useful in creating 'Home Pages', and there are many HTML authoring tools available through the Internet (Sigler, 1996).

Since developing Home Pages is relatively easy, it is possible to create Web documents without fully understanding how hypertext markup language actually works. While the hidden HTML code tells a browser program how to display a document on the Web, exactly how that document actually appears on a computer monitor (e.g., appearance of the text, where the graphics appear on the screen, the color of the background, etc.) depends upon how the browser program interprets that HTML code. Consequently, the same Web document may have a very different look when viewed with Netscape Navigator, Mosaic, or a Web browser provided by a commercial online service provider. In addition, various preference settings in one's browser program allow the user to 'customize' the appearance of a HTML-coded document (e.g., type and size of the fonts) to meet one's own tastes. Designers of Web documents should remember that they cannot always be sure how the document that they have created actually appears to other people.

Searching the Web for Information

Since information on the Internet is not well-organized, the task of locating specific documents among the millions of files that reside on thousands of Web servers can be quite daunting. Catalogs like The Internet Yellow Pages (Hahn and Stout, 1995) give some insight as to the vastness of this information resource. Computer programs called 'search engines' are a recent and powerful way of locating information on the Internet. The first search engine, Yahoo! [http://www.yahoo.com.], was developed in 1994 at Stanford University. This program utilizes human indexers to survey and categorize resources on the Web. Initially this system worked well, when there were a few thousand Web sites: the indexers sorted documents by their title pages. But by the fall of 1995, there were about 200,000 Web sites and the numbers seem to be growing exponentially.

Since there is no limit to the total number of sites that are accessible on the Web, it has become necessary to rely more heavily on electronic searching. Automated Web search engines are sometimes referred to as 'robots', 'worms', or 'spiders', and they include such fancifully named creations as WebCrawler [http://www.webcrawler.com] and Lycos [http://www.lycos.com] (Wiggins, 1995). Since each search engine is a computer program that uses a unique 'strategy' to search the Internet, the results of various search engines may or may not contain the same documents. Thus more than one search engine must be used to insure that the searches are comprehensive. Two recent experiments harness existing search engines in parallel to give users the combined results of their Internet searches: MetaCrawler [http://www.metacrawler.com] and UseIt! [http://www.he.net/~kamus/useen.htm]. Yahoo!, Lycos, WebCrawler, MetaCrawler, AltaVista, Excite, and other useful search engines can be found at the C.A.U.Z. Web Site.

There is no one ultimate search tool for the World Wide Web. Various search engines use different search techniques and offer different ways of 'viewing' the Web. A search engine sends out an array of queries on the Web, starting with a few servers whose files it searches either completely, word by word, or in summary fashion for titles, key words and abstracts, then makes a note of links in these files to other sites. Those links lead to further searches, which expand outward in a widening circle, much like a chain letter. And - fortunately for the person who has entered a key word or phrase into a search engine - all this electronic activity takes place automatically!

Two 'strategies' used by search engines lead to 'depth-first' or 'breadth-first' searches. And because each search engine involves a different computer program, each may lead to different results: a search for 'wildlife conservation' using one search engine might locate Internet documents that differ from those found by second search engine. Search engines are clearly very valuable tools, although conducting what one might consider to be a comprehensive search of the Internet would involve using a variety of different search engines. This process can be quite time-consuming, especially since not all of the documents found by a search engine are equally relevant. Consequently, many people prefer to begin with the hypertext links that are provided by established Web Sites. The C.A.U.Z. Web Site, for example, provides links to more than 700 documents in a variety of topics: these links are a convenient and efficient way to locate important information resources in the World Wide Web. When the user finds the name and description of a document of interest (e.g., one dealing with wildlife conservation), a click of the mouse automatically retrieves that document, which usually provides hypertext links to other relevant documents on the same or related topics. The result of such 'non-linear searching' using these hypertext links to relevant information on the Internet can be very rewarding and sometimes surprising.

The C.A.U.Z. Web Site

The Consortium of Aquariums, Universities and Zoos was founded in 1985 for the purpose of facilitating communication and collaboration between university scientists and educators and their counterparts at zoos and aquariums around the world (Hardy, 1992). Information submitted to C.A.U.Z. has been available through annual printed directories since 1987 and has been widely used by many people. For example, the database was analyzed in 1993 in an effort to understand the kind of research activities that take place in zoos and aquariums (Hardy, 1996). The C.A.U.Z. Web Site was established in August 1995, and with the development of the C.A.U.Z. search tool by Tim Knight (C.A.U.Z. Webmaster), a user can conduct online searches of the information submitted by hundreds of scientists and educators who are dedicated to wildlife conservation. Its simple menu and numerous hypertext links allow the user to learn of the interests and current projects (as well as titles, institutions, addresses, and phone and fax numbers) of C.A.U.Z. Network members. There are also listings of people who have a professional focus in a wide range of fields - from Animal Behavior and Conservation Biology to Restoration Ecology and Wildlife Management - as well as listings of people with interests in specific groups of animals or who are conducting field studies in many countries. The C.A.U.Z. database can be searched with key words: names of animals, institutions, cities or countries, or the specialties (e.g., 'marine mammal ecology', 'population dynamics', 'reproductive biology') of C.A.U.Z. Network members. The user can also search for a name that is listed alphabetically under a particular professional focus or an animal group. And if a C.A.U.Z. Network member has an e-mail address, the user can send an e-mail message to that member directly from the C.A.U.Z. Web Site.

Applications of the Web for International Conservation

In addition to the hypertext links, its hypermedia capability makes the World Wide Web very special. It can retrieve color images or graphics, sound and motion pictures as well as text. The recent proliferation of Home Pages by zoos and aquariums can probably be attributed to its application to marketing and public relations. Indeed, an examination of the very first efforts by zoos and aquariums to establish a 'Web presence' will reveal that most of their information is of the type found in advertising brochures. (In fact, some of the information the user finds on the Web about zoos and aquariums did not even originate with the institutions involved: the Home Page for one major zoo was established, apparently without their knowledge, by a local travel agent hoping to attract customers!) Some zoological institutions are making pioneering efforts to provide educational programs via the Web, and some institutions now provide excellent educational information. Some of these Home Pages offer glimpses of future applications of hypermedia by adding short motion pictures and sound to a wide array of colorful animal photographs. The AZA Home Page [http://www.aza.org/] and ZooNet [http://www.mindspring.com/~zoonet/] provide numerous links into many of these Home Pages.

While many current applications of the World Wide Web are indeed dazzling and highly entertaining, this technology cannot serve the needs of the international conservation community until computer-mediated communication is widely accepted. The potential use of computers in rapid and efficient distribution of information is beginning to be met by the increasing use of e-mail. But in reality, using e-mail is just another way of sending a letter to another person. New users of e-mail who have been relying on the post and fax are usually impressed by its immediacy: it is truly wonderful to be able to send a message internationally and get a direct reply within hours (or minutes) rather than days. But while e- mail is clearly more efficient and less expensive than facsimile or post, it is probably the least imaginative use of modern electronic communications technology.

The World Wide Web allows a user to 'interact' with the information provided by the server. For example, the data available through the C.A.U.Z. Web Site comes from its large international database. This information - as well as information provided by the IUCN (including the 1994 Red List of Threatened Animals) and by The International Species Inventory System (including ISIS Abstracts) - is available (and searchable) through the World Wide Web. For example, using the IUCN Site, the user can find the name of a species that is endangered in a particular country, then quickly check the ISIS Abstracts to learn in which zoos that species is exhibited. The user can then access the C.A.U.Z. Network to learn the names of people who share a professional interest in that species and are perhaps engaged in captive propagation of that species in captivity or in fieldwork in that country. The search tool provided at the C.A.U.Z. Web Site allows the user to enter the name of the animal (or country) to find people to contact. A great deal of information is provided for each person in the C.A.U.Z. Network, and this information is available anywhere on the Internet at any time.

Summary

The increasing use of the Internet has important implications for the international zoo community. First and foremost, computer-mediated communication is facilitating the sharing of information to a degree that has never been possible before. The potential for use of computers for rapid and efficient distribution of the kind of information needed by scientists engaged in conservation projects is starting to be met by the increasing use of e-mail, and in the near future, other applications of this technology will be found to be absolutely essential. Although the interactive capability of the Internet has not yet been fully explored, some of the more innovative means of communicating are now beginning to evolve. For example, the user can now access live images from various Internet 'cams' that have been placed in various locations all over the world, and since some of these video cameras can be controlled remotely, the viewer has some control over what images are being transmitted over the Internet. And the recent commercial availability of relatively inexpensive hardware and software now makes it possible for people to utilize visual and voice (or voice alone) communication via the Internet in 'real time' - rather like a two-way Internet 'video-phone' (or Internet phone). And other innovative Internet applications are being rapidly developed. Only the future will tell how these extraordinary advances in communications technology will be used by the worldwide conservation community.

References

Graham, I.S. (1995): The HTML Sourcebook. John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Hahn, H., and Stout, R. (1994): The Internet Complete Reference. Osborne McGraw-Hill, Berkeley, California.
Hahn, H., and Stout, R. (1995): The Internet Yellow Pages (2nd ed.). Osborne McGraw-Hill, Berkeley, California.
Hardy, D.F. (1992): The Consortium of Aquarium, Universities and Zoos. International Zoo News 39:8, pp. 17-20.
Hardy, D.F. (1994): The international zoo community and computer-mediated communication. International Zoo Yearbook 33, pp. 283-293.
Hardy, D.F. (1996): Current research activities in zoos. Wild Mammals In Captivity: Principles and Techniques (eds. Devra G. Kleiman et al.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Krol, E. (1994): The Whole Internet: User's Guide and Catalog (2nd ed.). O'Reilly and Associates, Sebastopol, California.
Minatel, J. (1995): Easy World Wide Web with Netscape. Que Corporation, Indianapolis, Indiana.
Richard, E. (1995): Anatomy of the World-Wide Web. Internet World 6:4, pp. 28-30.
Sigler, Douglas. (1996): HTML toolbox. Internet World 7:4, pp. 51-52.
Weiss, Aaron. (1996): Personal connections. Internet World 7:3, pp. 86-88.
Wiggins, R.W. (1995): Webolution: the evolution of the revolutionary World-Wide Web. Internet World 6(4), pp. 32-38.

[Note: the above articles in Internet World, as well as full-text versions of back issues of this magazine, are available on the World Wide Web: http://pubs.iworld.com/iw-online/]

1 Hypertext: a means by which one can retrieve other electronic documents by clicking (with a computer mouse) on highlighted words or graphics in a hypertext document.

2 Protocol: an agreed-upon convention for intercomputer communication.

3 A non-linear path differs from a linear (direct or straight) route in that it does not follow a single direction. In most documents, one reads the various sections in an uninterrupted sequence. With a hypertext document, one can click on a highlighted part of the test (or on graphics) and can go to another part of the same document or access entirely new documents - perhaps on other subjects - thus deviated from a sequential presentation of information. (One sometimes adopts a non-linear searching strategy when one looks up the definition of a word in a dictionary. Occasionally one will come across a word in this definition that is unfamiliar, and so be forced to look up that word too. The definition of this second word may also contain a word that must be looked up, and so forth. The path to the definition of the original word thus become more complex, because the route to understanding of the word is circuitous.)

4 In a document that is arranged hierarchically, subjects are categorized in order or ranks, each subordinate to the one above it. (The classification of animals in Phyla, Classes, Orders and Families is an example of a hierarchical arrangement.)

Donna FitzRoy Hardy, Ph.D., Network Coordinator, Consortium of Aquariums, Universities and Zoos, Department of Psychology, California State University, Northridge, California 91330, U.S.A.