Recent Internet applications such as the World Wide Web (WWW) and its
front-end browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape opened up a vista of
opportunities for collaboration among academics and professionals of
any discipline on a global basis
. The absence of proprietary standards on the
Internet make it an ``open'' system, where users from around the globe
can communicate and interact with each other without the need to have
specific, proprietary end-user applications. Since the introduction of
Gopher, the first Internet application which integrated diverse
capabilities such as content and location search for information
resources, document transfer and remote access, it has become
theoretically feasible to create a world-wide platform for rich
interactions between a large number of members of any given
profession. By virtue of its ability to link information resources
anywhere in the world, the Web takes a revolutionary step in the
direction of world-wide information dissemination and interactions. In
spite of its remarkable potential, we envision a serious problem of
Web ``infoglut'' in the near future in the absence of a shared
conceptual foundation for the organization of information on the
Web. Further, for the WWW to be an electronic forum for productive
interaction between researchers and professionals of various
disciplines, we see the need to have interactive capabilities
integrated with information repositories distributed over the
Internet.