[extropy-chat] Sir Berners-Lee and the semantic web

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he had something
bigger in mind all along. He tells TR how his 15 years of work on the
"Semantic Web" are finally paying off.

Berners-Lee is finally getting his reward: in July he was knighted by
Queen Elizabeth II, and the previous month he received Finland's
million-euro Millennium Technology Prize, awarded "for outstanding
technological achievements that directly promote people's quality of
life, are based on humane values, and encourage sustainable economic
development."

Now in new offices in MIT's Frank Gehry–designed Ray and Maria Stata
Center, the 49-year-old native of England is busy overseeing hundreds
of projects at the W3C. He is also personally engaged in developing
his second big idea: the Semantic Web, which adds definition tags to
information in Web pages and links them in such a way that computers
can discover data more efficiently and form new associations between
pieces of information, in effect creating a globally distributed
database. Though part of Berners-Lee's original intention for his
invention, the Semantic Web has been 15 years in the making and has
met its share of skepticism. But Berners-Lee believes it will soon win
acceptance, enabling computers to extract meaning from far-flung
information as easily as today's Internet simply links individual
documents.

The Semantic Web, coupled with other specifications and tools being
developed at W3C, including accessibility standards for disabled
people and software for mobile devices, is part of Berners-Lee's grand
vision of "a single Web of meaning, about everything and for
everyone." But is it a tangled web we weave? Despite his excitement
about the future, Berners-Lee worries that poorly conceived changes to
the Web's organization and governance could compromise its inherent
functionality and "universality." The father of the World Wide Web
shared his concerns—and dreams—the day before flying to Helsinki to
accept his Millennium prize.

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/frauenfelder1004.asp?trk=top