Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee

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You have touched on the idea that the Semantic Web will make it easier to discover cures for diseases. How will it do that?

Well, when a drug company looks at a disease, they take the specific symptoms that are connected with specific proteins inside a human cell which might lead to those symptoms. So the art of finding the drug is to find the chemical that will interfere with the bad things happening and encourage the good things happening inside the cell, which involves understanding the genetics and all the connections between the proteins and the symptoms of the disease.

It also requires looking at all the other connections, whether there are federal regulations about the use of the protein and how it's been used before. We've got government regulatory information, clinical trial data, the genomics data, and the proteomics data that are all in different departments and different pieces of software. A scientist who is going through that creative process of brainstorming to find something that could possibly solve the disease has to somehow keep everything in their head at the same time or be able to explore all these different axes in a connected way. The Semantic Web is a technology designed to specifically do that—to open up the boundaries between the silos, to allow scientists to explore hypotheses, to look at how things connect in new combinations that have never before been dreamt of.

The Semantic Web makes it so much easier to find and correlate information about nearly anything, including people. What happens if that information gets into the wrong hands? Is there anything that can be done to safeguard privacy?

Here at [MIT], we are doing research and building systems that are aware of the social issues. They are aware of privacy constraints, of the appropriate uses of information. We think it's important to build systems that help you do the right thing, but also we're building systems that, when they take data from many, many sources and combine it and allow you to come to a conclusion, are transparent in the sense that you can ask them what they based their decision on and they can go back and you can check if these are things that are appropriate to use and that you feel are trustworthy.

Developing Semantic Web standards has taken years. Has it taken a long time because the Semantic Web is so complex?

The Semantic Web isn't inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It's just about the relationships between things.