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By Newsweek Editors
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It's now 10 years since Tim Berners-Lee created the software behind the World Wide Web, allowing computers to tap into a single global data pool. At the time the British software engineer was working at CERN, the international physics laboratory in Geneva. Since then he has shunned opportunities to exploit the commercial potential of his invention. Now 45, Berners-Lee helps to shape the Web's future as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Meanwhile, he's also working on the development of the "Semantic Web," which will give machines the power to make intelligent assessment of data stored in cyberspace. He recently spoke to NEWSWEEK's William Underhill in London.
UNDERHILL: Why is the Semantic Web so important?
BERNERS-LEE: It's about [allowing] information to be understood by machines rather than just by people. At the moment the data is processed for human consumption, and if it is to be reprocessed [for machines] it first has to be undressed into raw data. That is very cumbersome. The Semantic Web says, "Let's get the data on the Web with its meaning."
For example, when the weather for a town appears on the Web, it will be on a pretty page, but it's not obvious to the computer which of the numbers on the page is actually the temperature. The Semantic Web means putting in hidden code indicating which is the temperature. It also indicates the sense of the word "temperature" that's being used. This is something we have been talking about for 10 years. Now it's actually happening. It's exciting: in some ways it's like the old days.
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Where will it lead?
If you had interviewed me 10 years ago and I tried to explain a hypertext space [the basis for the World Wide Web], I might have said: "There is a space of documents, each one has an address and the text on one can be linked by having the address encoded behind it so you just click on it when you get there." You would not have said, "Wow, this is going to revolutionize commerce." You would have said "Huh? That sounds pretty complicated to me." This is a whole new general infrastructure.
Do you still feel some sense of responsibility for the Web ?
A few years ago when people asked me how I felt about the Web, I described it as an adolescent: it was feeling its strength, wasn't quite sure what it could do and still needed a lot of attention and guidance. It still needs a lot of attention and guidance, but I don't feel responsible for it. There is a much wider community that is looking at it. The social issues, for example, are being resolved by the legal and the political process. In the early stages it was all up to the technologists because they were the only people who understood it.
What are your concerns over the Web's development?
I am worried about privacy but I don't think it's insuperable. I am more worried about the "great divide" problem. When you look at maps, connectivity is obviously very much denser in the developed world. But on the other side of the coin, there's a real chance of accelerating the Third's World's integration with the rest of the world [through the Internet].
I asked someone the other day who'd been a missionary in Africa about whether the Internet had been been a help or a hindrance. She told me of someone who had taught herself English just from the Bible and was now earning a living by translating documents she received in English over the Internet into the local dialect.
Once that person is enabled by being connected technologically and culturally--on the very, very simple level of language--it can bring in revenue in a way that was previously impossible and can help a whole village. There are very, very many jobs which are just "information-in, information-out" that can be done by people anywhere in the world if they are given the Internet.
Doesn't it annoy you when you are credited with inventing the Internet--rather than the Web?
That is embarrassing. We are talking about something [developed] 20 years earlier. One must remember that once I dropped the seed of the Web, people on the Net took it up. There was a wonderful grass-roots uprising.
You made a conscious decision not to exploit the Web for your own benefit. Any regrets ?
No. The Web would never have happened if there had been a central point of control; if there had been, for example, central registration of Web sites for a fee. If it had been a proprietary system, there would have been people jumping into the market with their own competing systems. So there would not have been this tremendous interoperability--which is the Web.
How will the Web be seen in 20 years?
People will talk about the Web in the same way that they talk about paper. They won't be discussing it as a phenomenon; they will just assume it.
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