a future of structured information in which data is surrounded by a layer of soft- ware, where content is encapsulated in procedures, with active object interfaces that say, "Show me your language or rendering, show me your media rendering, transcribe yourself to my media." Cataloguing and indexing of digital objects will similarly gain importance. A whole new world of information management is arising from the growing codification of objects alone. We can also expect to see the rise of digital object identifiers, uninterpreted strings as handles, the binding of objects and controls and indexed repositories, digital signatures for authenticity and integrity protec- tion, codification of copyright control terms and conditions, and long-term storage that can last hundreds of years. We have many storage and media challenges to overcome. For example, mem- ory sticks break. We seem to all be swimming in a vast sea of CDs. How long will today's digital media last? How will we approach the concept of media rewriting, going from videotape to CD to DVD? And how do we handle exabyte and attabyte archives? We're looking toward molecular memories and biological memories, as discussed in the introduction. There are more questions to answer as well: How do we deal with indexing? How do we handle read/write rates? The solutions will no doubt involve the index- ing of unstructured data; the standardization of information representation; the creation of new Web crawlers and search engines; the association of media with text; the indexing of images, video, audio, music, and so on; and the need for pow- erful new tools for finding otherwise unstructured information, such as blogs. The Semantic Web There is much talk about the next generation of the Web-a concept referred to as the Semantic Web (www.semanticweb.org). This is Sir Tim Berners-Lee's latest What's Next on the Internet project, and it is focused on creating a universal medium for information exchange using refined indexing and searching-in other words, providing meaning 