World Wide Web
The World Wide Web, also known as the WWW and the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and to the general public on the Internet in August 1991.
Technological and industrial history of 21st-century Canada
The Internet has also become an important source of information, marked by the popularity of such sites as Wikipedia and Google Earth. Wikipedia, an on-line encyclopedia, was established in the US in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and presently has over 5,000,000 articles in English and a large number in other languages. Many articles have been contributed to both the English and French language versions of Wikipedia by Canadians, and many of these relate to important aspects of Canadian life. There are thousands of Canadians who use the service every day in both English and French. Google Earth, a virtual globe, is an on-line feature offered by Google since 2005. It provides aerial views of the Earth and is viewed by thousands of web users, many of which are Canadian, every day. Another Internet information service, the telephone directory Canada 411.ca, has become very popular since introduced in recent years. This has led to the delivery of the residential paper telephone book, introduced to Canada in 1878, being cancelled in major cities in 2010.