World Wide Web Virtual Library
The World Wide Web Virtual Library was the first index of content on the World Wide Web and still operates as a directory of e-texts and information sources on the web. It was started by Tim Berners-Lee creator of HTML and the World Wide Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva. Unlike commercial index sites, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert. It is sometimes informally referred to as the "WWWVL", the "Virtual Library" or just "the VL".
Global brain
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, too, was inspired by the free-associative possibilities of the brain for his invention. The brain can link different kinds of information without any apparent link otherwise; Berners-Lee thought that computers could become much more powerful if they could imitate this functioning, i.e. make links between any arbitrary piece of information. The most powerful implementation of encyclopedism to date is Wikipedia, which integrates the associative powers of the world-wide-web with the collective intelligence of its millions of contributors, approaching the ideal of a global memory. The Semantic web, also first proposed by Berners-Lee, is a system of protocols to make the pieces of knowledge and their links readable by machines, so that they could be used to make automatic inferences, thus providing this brain-like network with some capacity for autonomous "thinking" or reflection.