The Internet Pilot to Physics: An Open Information System for Physics Research and Education

In this article we discuss the effort made by the Internet Pilot to Physics (TIPTOP) project to develop a uniform and open information infrastructure for physics research and education. We discuss concepts such as communication in research and education, the importance of distributed indexing and catalogs, and briefly the use of new technology such as VRML and Java. We also stress the importance of developing and using standardized protocols and formats such as the Summary Object Interchangeable Format (SOIF) and Thematic Uniform Resource Agents (TURA). TIPTOP has rapidly grown to be one of the most popular physics Internet knowledge servers, and the recently established collaboration with the European Physical Society is an important step forward in developing a stable framework of high quality information for researchers and educators.