Wheeling native and West Liberty University alumna Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler was recently named as an inductee to the Internet Society’s Hall of Fame inaugural class. The inductees were announced Monday in Geneva, Switzerland, at Internet Society’s annual conference, where the group is celebrating its 20th year. ISOC is home to the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet’s technical standards setting body, and is funded largely by the .org top level domain.

The inaugural group includes 33 of the Internet’s most influential engineers, evangelists and entrepreneurs including Internet fathers Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf; Internet standards guru Jon Postel; web inventor Tim Berners-Lee; encryption pioneer Phil Zimmerman; and Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker. Former vice president Al Gore is being inducted as well. As a U.S. senator in the 1980s, Gore was the first politician to grasp the potential of the Internet.

The inductees fall into three categories: Pioneers who were key to the early design of the Internet; Innovators who built on the Internet’s foundations with technical innovations and policy work; and Global Connectors who have helped expand the Internet’s growth and use around the world. Feinler is being inducted into the Hall of Fame under the Pioneer category.

Known to friends as “Jake,” Elizabeth Feinler was at the forefront of the development of the Internet and is credited with having coined the phrase and context of “dot com.” A 1954 graduate of then West Liberty State College, she received her master’s degree from Purdue University. Throughout her career, she cultivated computer information services for universities, government agencies and private firms. She ran the Network Information Center for the Science Research Center, which developed the earliest Internet search engines, the concept of menu-driven computer interfaces, and techniques for displaying and composing e-mail offline long before the creation of Windows or Macintosh. Her group also created the naming registry for world wide web domains, resulting in the now famous “.com” designation behind web addresses, along with “.edu,” “.gov,” “.org,” and “.mil.”

Feinler was recognized for her achievements by her alma mater, and in 2001 was inducted into the West Liberty Alumni Wall of Honor.