Abstract

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the world wide web. He created the hypertext program as an academic tool to allow scientists to share date. It has revolutionized the net and has had a profound impact on everyday life. It's hard to overstate the impact of the global system he created. He took a powerful communications system that only the elite could use and turned it into a mass medium.

"The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information."

Background

A graduate of Oxford University. He now holds the 3Com Founders chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also directs the World Wide Web Consortium.

The internet was invented by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn who defined the 'internet Protocal' by which packet are sent on from one computer to another until they reach their destination. Berners-Lee invented was the global hypertext system called the world wide web, which is an abstract space of information. On the web connections are between hypertext links.

Description

In 1980 Berners-Lee was trying to find a way to organise information in a "brain-like way" as a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva. So he devised a piece of software that could, as he put it, keep "track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn't." He called it Enquire, short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, a Victorian-era encyclopedia he remembered from childhood. He wrote the program for his private use at first. Words in a document could be "linked" to other files on his computer. Then he decided to open up his computer to allow other people to link their information to his. In Berners-Lee's scheme there would be no central manager, no central database and no scaling problems. The thing could grow like the Internet itself, open-ended and infinite.

He designed an addressing scheme that gave each Web page a unique location, or url (universal resource locator). And he hacked a set of rules that permitted these documents to be linked together on computers across the Internet. He called that set of rules HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). He also designed teh first web browser.

He proposed a global hypertext project in 1989. It is designed to allow people to work together in a web of hypertext documents. The computer code he came up with let scientists easily share research findings across a computer network.

"The whole point about hypertext was that (unlike most project management and documentation systems) it could model a changing morass of relationships which characterized most real environments I knew "

"The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together."

Berners-Lee founded W3C at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. It consists of companies which have joined together to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Internet. Since its foundation he has served as the director of the consortium.

Analysis

Berners-Lee believes that it is just as important to be able to edit the Web as to browse it, that computers can be used for background tasks that enable humans to work better in groups and that Computer scientists should be morally responsible.

"It was simply that had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off.  The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal.  You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it."

The web allows anyone to experiment with new extensions. This produces the threat of fragmentation into many Webs. It is this threat that brings the companies of W3C together.

He believes that educators should create a huge supplies of online materials which will be freely available to developing countries. The problem with this would be the effort involved to keep the information up to date.

The web is the basis of a knowledge based economy.

"The Web will open up new forms of business altogether, and make us rethink the way we run existing businesses. It can turn bureaucracy over to machines, and let people get on with the creativity. It will help us see where we each fit, with our own experience, talents and passions, among the millions of other people and theirs. It can help us work together more effectively, remove misunderstanding, and bring about peace and harmony on a global scale."

Conclusion

Future of the internet.
There are recent attempts in the US by telecom companies to implement a two-tier system. Data from providers that can pay will be given an advantage over those that cannot. Institutions like universities will be likely to suffer.

Berners-Lee believes in an open model of the internet based on the concept of network neutrality. Everyone has the same level of access to the web and all data moving around the web is treated equally. He believes that the current model, where any content provider could pay for an internet connection and put any content onto the web is how the internet should remain.

"What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web. Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

There are many parts of his original dream which are not yet implemented.  For example, very few people have and easy, intuitive tool for putting their thoughts into hypertext. Also links on the web get lost.

"Meta" is used with anything which is about itself - so a metabook would be a book about books, and metadata is data about data.  On the Web, this means all sorts of information about information: its ownership, authorship, distribution rights, privacy policy, and so on. These needs are driving us to make ways of putting information on the web designed for computers to be able to understand.  Web pages at the moment in HTML are designed to be read by humans. In the future, some Web pages will be in "RDF" -- Resource Description Framework.  This will be read by computer programs which will help us organize ourselves and our data and possibly everything we do."

Reference

Tim Berners-Lee. http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

Tim Berners-Lee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/bernerslee.html