A Huge Hypermedia Database

The Internet can be seen as a huge database providing a constantly changing web of information to all its users. Some different services are available for most Internet users already today:

• Thousands of news groups where the reader can participate by sending articles readable to all other visitors of the newsgroup.

• Electronic mail, whereby individuals can send and receive items of text, audiograms, even video to other (groups of) individuals.

• FTP-access points, where files of general interest are stored and can be fetched or uploaded by the user.

• World Wide Web, WWW, a system whereby uniquely identified individual pages of information can be linked by the user into a world wide information system, behaving much like a hypermedia based information database distributed on a CD-rom.

There are WWW-servers providing excerpts of CD-productions for free, notably IUMA, (the Internet Underground Music Archive) and some universities. Also computer software, sample libraries, and MIDI file archives, useful for the production of music, have appeared of the WWW lately. Basically this can be seen as a promising complement to the existing channels, but especially for ``narrow'' areas, like serious EAM, the global coverage of the network can provide a substantial audience also for rather unconventional pieces of art work.