Tim Berners-Lee: Challenges of the Second Decade

Tim Berners-Lee is the Director of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). As most of you know, he is also regarded as the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim's inspiring talk was a look back at his original dream of communication and collaboration, what actually became the World Wide Web, his view of the present State of the Union, and his dream of things to come.

Tim recalled his original proposal that beget the Web (but originally called "[Information] Mesh"), entitled Information Management - A Proposal and dated March 1989. His manager reviewed the proposal and scribbled a comment on page one: "Vague but exciting". In late 1990, the first browser appeared but it wasn't until 1993 that there was a proliferation of browsers and several hundred web servers. In 1994, there were two major conferences, WWW1 and WWW2, and of course the formation of W3C. CSS1 became a recommendation in late 1996. Early 1997 saw the release of HTML 3.2; HTML 4.0 followed in late 1997. In 1998, the major events were XML, CSS2 and the DOM. 1999 has seen progress in WAI (web accessibility), XHTML, XSL,and SVG (scalable vector graphics).

Tim offered that Amaya (the W3C browser/editor) and Jigsaw (the W3C Java-based web server) support HTTP 1.1 and with that, version control and simultaneous updates. He emphasized that there is no excuse for authoring tools to produce invalid HTML, but he was kind enough not to mention any names.

TBL (I believe) coined the term "Semantic Web" which was then echoed many times throughout the week. The Semantic Web is characterized by machine communication based on data with well-defined meaning, definable results, and logical deductions. However, the Semantic Web is not about artificial intelligence; it is not about making humans understandable to machines, but rather making data understandable. The Semantic Web, he said, will have as much impact on the world as the first generation Web has had, once we get it right. This will involve lots of expressive power, a language on top of RDF (which is itself layered on XML). A few of the many benefits will be that anything can point to anything; documents can be self-describing; and searches will be more meaningful and finite. Steps in the right direction include RDF model/syntax/schemas, XML namespaces, XML Schemas, Dublin Core, RPMfind, and Signed XML. Tim begged us to "Get your data models clean!"

One of TBL's last points was to blast those that have abused the patent laws. He said, "Patents aren't serving the industry the way they were intended to." It is far too easy to claim a patent. Someone asked if Internet2 was likely to be a danger to the Web. Tim said, no, it will have to be a part of the Web, not a competitor.

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