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During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
Money Moves, 5/24: Chocomize Co-Founder Fabian Kaempfer talks with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the business of customizing chocolate
The president's campaign has a new rule—no cell phones allowed
In honor of remote control inventor Eugene Polley, we recognize other influential but neglected inventors who have felt the sting of stolen glory
Forget Adderall. Traders now pop chia seeds to stay focused and energized
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
Get Four
|  | OCTOBER 22, 2004
The Web's Father Expects a Grandchild [Page 2 of 2] Q: Can you give me an example? A: Say you're looking for a photograph in a certain state. And you have another photograph somewhere with a ZIP code. The machine understands that we're talking about location, and a Semantic Web search engine could actually go out and learn, find the logic on the Web, and then know that when something is in a given ZIP code, it's also in a given state. So, a search by state would also be able to find things categorized by ZIP code. That's a very simple, even trivial example. But the point is that the person who wrote the correlation between ZIP codes and states and put it out on the Web didn't know who was going to use it and for what. And in fact, somebody has used it to turn a request for photographs that wasn't going to work into one that does. The effect is that when you have an idea, you can go out and test it against what everybody else knows. That will be very much more powerful. In the world of databases, this would be called a database join. But maybe nobody has ever thought before about joining those two databases.... That power of being able to reuse data will be very important, and frankly, when you're looking at a major innovation challenge, like finding new drugs, a cure for AIDS or cancer, these involve so much data from so many different fields that we're going to need the Semantic Web to be functional before we can crack those. Q: How close are we to the realization of that vision? A: I'd guess 5 to 10 years before we really have the Semantic Web humming, and we have large systems being used by scientists as a matter of course. It will be 10 years before we get to the state, like with the Web now, where you can be sure the information is there, and you're shocked if it's not It'll be 10 years before we have all the health information about drugs out there. I would expect then to be able to swipe a bar code on a package and get back any allergy information. Or in the supermarket, I should be able to swipe a bar code and find out from the Semantic Web whether it contains peanuts. It's so obviously valuable to have that information, so obviously in the public good, and it can obviously be connected with other information. Hopefully, we may get to the point in 10 or 15 years where all information is on the Semantic Web. Q: What's your take on the general state of innovation these days? A: Would it be possible to develop the World Wide Web in today's climate? If you say "innovation" around here, the typical word association would be "patent." That's a negative association, not a positive one. There's a very strong fear that the rush to patent everything will stifle innovation. The ability to patent really silly, un-novel, boring things which just clutter the space of potential innovation makes it a minefield for somebody who's really being innovative. It prevents them from brainstorming and putting together a whole lot of half-formed ideas into something really effective, because each of those half-formed ideas is blocked by patents. You can't talk about innovation without a big question mark about whether business can be grown up about patents and actually let software engineers develop things without squabbling over intellectual property rights in such a way as to stifle innovation. Q: People in the U.S. are waking up to the negative effects this is having on innovation, and in Europe, there's a big argument over software patents. A: Yes. Over the last five years, we've been trying very hard at the World Wide Web consortium to get industry together so that they can put down standards for infrastructure, whether Web services or the Semantic Web or multimedia portable devices. And they realize that there's a huge potential market there which will work if and only if the infrastructure standards are available royalty-free. I think there's been a huge learning process. Some of the big companies now realize that it's essential that they have a royalty-free space for the infrastructure or it's not going to take off.
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