|
|
Get Four
|  | OCTOBER 22, 2004
The Web's Father Expects a Grandchild Tim Berners-Lee is working on the "Semantic Web," with its richer information links that unlock the power of "unplanned reuse of data" Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in the late 1980s while working as a researcher at the Geneva-based European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). He's now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., where he holds the 3Com Founders chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Berners-Lee is also the director of the nonprofit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a group of 400 companies and organizations that collaborate on standards and technologies for the Web. His recent work concerns development of the "Semantic Web," a scheme that could someday put virtually all the data in the world online. Instead of just linking static pages, as with today's Internet, the Semantic Web will join together vast repositories of information now locked up in corporate or public databases, linking it all together through intelligent recognition of patterns and intersections among disparate information sources. Berners-Lee recently spoke with Andy Reinhardt, BusinessWeek's tech correspondent in Paris, about the evolution of the Internet, how it can improve productivity, and obstacles to innovation. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow: Q: How has the Internet changed the process of innovation? A: Looking back to 1989, when I was proposing the Web, my personal need was to use it as a tool for innovation, to bring volunteer software engineers from different physics labs together in an informal collaboration to produce common software, rather than just writing their own. Even though they were in different labs in different countries, [the idea was] to make the sum greater than the parts. The original goal was that the Web should be a sort of play space. There are a lot of tools that have come a long way, and people work from all kinds of places. But I still think we've got a long way to go. We need to use machines to help us manage ourselves socially more: To help us manage meetings, to take minutes, keep track of action items, keep track of what we've got to do, what we've passed off to other people -- all the social interactions in an organization. Q: Do you think the plain old Web and the ability to find things so quickly and to link them so easily have had a productivity impact on innovation? A: I do think it's a step in productivity, but it's a finite step. For instance, a lot of people are still using slide shows that don't have hypertext links in them. That doesn't allow people to author collaboratively. In a lot of enterprises, the challenge is to make the innovative power of a group greater than the power of one person. If one person has a germ of an idea, but it's not a whole idea, how do you take that partly formed idea and expose it to his colleagues? That's an exciting thing. The craving that people have for things like Wikis and Web logs, and the extent to which they're being used, demonstrates this need for collaborative spaces. But the Wikis and blogs are still very crude. They both approach this need for an intuitive collaborative space from different angles. Q: You're working now on the Semantic Web, which will allow richer associations among data and, as the name implies, start to create a sense of "meaning" in online information. Where are things heading? A: The impact of the Semantic Web will be different from [today's] hypermedia Web. The Web is very visible. You can see it through a Web browser, and it's very easy for people to get a feel for what it is because it's really a space for human beings. The Semantic Web is different. It's a space of data. It's all the information which is now in databases, spreadsheets, and application-specific files, like calendar files or photo metadata. What's exciting about the Semantic Web is its potential for serendipity, the unplanned reuse of data. The effect will be even more powerful for the Semantic Web because you won't have to be a person following the links. A machine will be able to follow links.
  | | |
 Copyright 2004, Bloomberg L.P.Terms of Use | Privacy Notice |
Printer-Friendly Version
