Critical to much NII use in health care are large-scale distributed databases to store patient records and medical instrument data. This should lead to more cost-effective health care with sophisticated database search techniques reducing fraud and waste while the large collection of uniformly prepared records will help emergency care, and the identification of ``best of practice'' care plans for particular medical problems.
Telemedicine (or remote medical care) naturally uses collaboration services, as well as the metacomputer capability for control of remote instruments. This could extend to use of a full televirtual environment for virtual-reality controlled remote surgery in battlefield or accident scenarios.
The NII is expected to make major impact on education both at the K--12, and University level. Indeed, the concept of the Virtual University [30] indicates that some fundamental concepts underlying the traditional residential college may need to be rethought. The bases of the educational use of the NII is collaboration and InfoVISiON. Rich collaboration environments including three-dimensional MOOs will support student-student and student-teacher interactions around the globe, and help students in rural areas and those home sick. InfoVISiON will allow full interactive and explorative multimedia curricula that can be expected to be more successful than current analog video delivery of distance education. We are currently working on Java and WebFlow based tools to support educational delivery systems.
Note that hyperlinking capabilities of the WWW are just as important as multimedia, for it enables student controlled exploration as opposed to current rather rigid model of learning embodied in a book. Geographical Information Systems will allow virtual field trips using the NII.
The initial motivation for the installation of commercial NII communication instrastructure is digital delivery of current CATV and video rental services. This InfoVISiON capability will naturally generalize to a full range of multimedia products on demand, but it is unclear what novel services will be profitable. The NII will also enable advanced community networks that will given an interesting new view of local society, and could have a very important impact on local government. Commerce services will enable shopping and banking on the NII. InfoVISiON services would include multimedia digital yellow pages and online catalogs. The yellow pages could use an NII implementation of geographical information systems while virtual reality interfaces could allow you to try out new products such as cars and clothes. Collaboration services would support gossip as in today's computer forums and generalize the popular talk shows on radio and TV.
Current OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) systems include these used in approving and recording credit card transactions. This is a type of InfoVISiON service which is operational today. It has major demands for security and reliability, but is comparatively undemanding on computer and network performance. On the other hand, decision support will be an important NII (InfoVISiON) service which could, as in Section 2, involve the search of a single giant relational database or a galaxy wide search of heterogeneous distributed database. Decision support is of growing interest in areas such as fraud detection, inventory planning, and market segmentation.
Both distributed business enterprises and scientific collaboratories can use workflow support as in Lotus Notes, which integrates collaboration, project management, and distributed databases. We can expect enterprise system support based on Web technology to be a major opportunity for early successful WebWindows applications.
A critical feature of this class of application is the need to make quick decisions in the presence of incomplete inaccurate data. We can term this scenario as judgment (as opposed to decision) support with the less precise context leading to the need for an InfoVISiON exploratorium. This will support multiple, but related video streams (say from different reporters of a given event) that need to be linked in time. Critical features of the network used to support crises is that it links a real-time, ``come as you are'' adaptive mix of computers and people. This is a complex metasystem mixing dynamic metacomputers and collaboration.
There are major needs to search community and government databases for immediate information on resource location and availability. As these databases are likely to be unfamiliar to judgment makers, metadata summaries in common formats are essential.
Collaboration will be required to link commanders in the field, specialized anchor disks (domain experts) and those in the field. A special issue will be the importance of excellent user interfaces as users will be tired and searching unfamiliar data. Geographical information systems will be very helpful as judgments will depend critically on spatial data.
As desired by Wulf [31], the NII and collaboration services could enable much richer forms of scientific and engineering collaboration. This could link the national laboratories into a single superlab; it could enable innovative multidisciplinary research---another future trend---between researchers in industry and multiple universities; it could enable partnerships between major universities and developing minority institutions. Clearly, collaborative research and learning brings demanding requirements to future NII collaboration services.
Scholarly work traditionally involves the search of distributed databases and supported on the NII by InfoVISiON (digital library) services. Metacomputing will be needed for multidisciplinary multi-institution simulations, and for control, data storage, and analysis associated with remote instruments, such as satellites, telescopes, and accelerators.
The collaboratory will need workflow support, as in business enterprises (Section 4.2(d)) with special needs for distributed (over institutions) software engineering support for the production of distributed (over computers) software.