[CMC] Web Founder Promotes Future Cooperation

[Adrian J. Hooke]

Web Founder Says Cooperation Needed to Create 'Semantic Web,' Next 
Generation of Technology
The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20040930_1348.html

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Sept. 30, 2004 : The inventor of the World Wide Web told a 
technology conference on Wednesday that making the Web more useful hinges 
on a familiar challenge: Getting the players behind the technology to agree 
on standards governing how computers communicate with one another.

That obstacle, which confronted the initial development of the Web, looms 
large again in the nascent stages of what Tim Berners-Lee calls the 
"Semantic Web," an evolutionary process to make more kinds of data easier 
for computers to locate and process.

"It's all about standards," Berners-Lee told an audience of about 500 in a 
speech opening Technology Review magazine's two-day Emerging Technologies 
Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Standards are the 
basis for any emergent technology."

The obstacles in the way of advancing Web development are as much social as 
they are technological, and the industry must avoid the temptation to lock 
up key technologies by demanding royalty payments, he said.

Berners-Lee, a 49-year-old native of England who runs the standard-setting 
World Wide Web Consortium from an office at MIT, envisions a new phase of 
the Web in which the various sources of information can more readily 
interact with one another.

Rather than merely navigating their way via Web links to information 
related to their interests, Web surfers should be able to manipulate it to 
intelligently steer them to data with specific meaning to that person, he said.

Berners-Lee cited the example of a Web advertisement for a seminar. While 
the computer user may know what the information means, the computer 
doesn't. Someone planning to attend would have to note the date by pasting 
data into an electronic calendar, or add the names of people taking part in 
the seminar into an address book.

Berners-Lee envisions encoding the information in a way that enables the 
computer to comprehend the data and seamlessly link it to applications, 
automatically adding information about the seminar into a calendar or 
address book.

That involves standardizing how information is stored on the Internet. Web 
data would carry tags to give them meaning, so computers can do a better 
job of searching.

Such developments could enable search engines to not only find data, but 
point users to what they are likely to seek next, he said. Ultimately, 
software could be written to process the data and make inferences that 
previously required human intervention.

"These different applications will link through the common concepts they 
share, such as location and time," Berners-Lee said.

Achieving such a transformation, he said, requires agreements on standards 
to make data available for sharing among applications so information can be 
re-used in new ways, he said.

He said he still views the Web as the "collaborative medium" he had in mind 
when he first proposed it in 1989. He later fleshed out core communications 
needed to transmit Web pages, and the Web took off in the 1990s. Although 
his inventions have undergone rapid changes since then, the core technology 
remains the same.

At the World Wide Web Consortium, Berners-Lee directs an open forum of 
companies and organizations dedicated to lead the Web to its full potential.

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