We divide potential NII (National Information Infrastructure) services
into five broad areas: Collaboration and televirtuality; InfoVISiON
(Information, Video, Imagery, and Simulation on Demand), and digital
libraries; commerce; metacomputing; WebTop productivity services. The
latter denotes the broad suite of tools we expect to be offered on the
Web in a general environment we term WebWindows. We review current
and future World Wide Web technologies, which could underlie these
services. In particular, we suggest an integration framework WebWork
for High Performance (parallel and distributed) computing and the NII.
We point out that pervasive WebWork and WebWindows technologies
will enable, facilitate and substantially accelerate such complex
software processes on the NII.
We briefly analyze seven broad application areas: society; business
enterprises; health care; defense command and control, and crisis
management; education; collaboratory; manufacturing. We contrast
their use of NII services with a more detailed examination of the
manufacture of complex systems, such as aircraft and automobiles.
This application will stress the NII, but there is a remarkable
opportunity to develop new manufacturing practices that offer cost
savings and reduced time to market.