Where to Start

More and more technical journals now publish URLs. More and more organisations have a home page. Fortunately, the format of the addresses is relatively consistent: more than often, the name looks like

www.organisation.org_type
or
www.organisation.country_code

For example

www.nrc.ca

represents NRC's own home page.

Most high technology organisations have a home page.

A few examples include www.sgi.com, www.nt.com, www.ams.org.

But where does one start when one wants to explore what is out there$?$ The easiest way is to use someone else's work (we all do for driving; that's what maps are).

That ``someone else's work" is a list of lists (also known as portals), or a home page filled with interesting starting points. That's probably all you need to get started!

One of the more popular portal is

http://www.yahoo.com
or
http://www.yahoo.ca

Governments are increasingly creating portals for their own services.

http://www.canada.gc.ca

is an entry point for the federal government services.