Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, talks about the
future of semantic web services, how voice will interface with data
and how spam is not his fault.
Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),
believes the next wave of internet development will fundamentally
alter the way we share data, and voice will be at the heart of that
transformation.
Fragmentation of the web has been one of Berners-Lee's greatest
fears. A common patent policy was agreed in May by members of the
W3C, which develops the protocols that underpin the web.
W3C members, which include major IT, telecoms and media suppliers,
had threatened to patent key web components. "Patents are a huge
problem and involve a huge amount of work," Berners-Lee said.
"But now that theW3C is a royalty-free zone, I am sleeping better
at night."
Berners-Lee also believes that excessive focus on safeguarding
intellectual property rights through patents could stifle
technological creativity.
"In the US the bar for novelty is set much too low. Most patents
are used defensively by companies like a nuclear stockpile to
threaten each other with," he said. This approach, he added, causes
problems, particularly for isolated inventors.
Today the web is focused on the document, said Berners-Lee. The
semantic web, the next generation of the technology, will be about
the well-defined representation of data to enable users to compare
and share data on different websites automatically and without
human intervention.
"The semantic web will be exciting. It will interconnect things
that cannot be done now," he said. Its development is proceeding
apace.
"The first phase of development is where there is nothing there,
and people ask why we are looking at using silly languages," he
said.
"The second phase is where metadata standards start to be deployed.
This is where the semantic web is today."
At the heart of the semantic web is the Resource Description
Framework, a term for metadata standards that Berners-Lee believes
will become as familiar as HTML or XML. RDF integrates a variety of
applications using XML for syntax and URLs for naming.
Phase three, which will see the creation of a rules-based system
around this core, is going to be the most exciting, said
Berners-Lee.
He believes that the integration of the semantic web with web
services will revolutionise the way we use data. For example,
geospatial applications could automatically add information to
features on maps from other domains.
Another area where this will have an impact is biotechnology, where
differing data terms in overlapping fields such as chemistry and
pharmaceuticals could be uniformly recognised.
Berners-Lee also predicted that voice will be used to interface
with the web - a trend being driven by a proliferation of different
devices. "It used to be very convenient when we all used
computers," he said. "But now we do not share a common state so
people will use voice a lot more.
"Voice will be a big challenge for web development. Voice
technology has been promised for so long. It is now more usable,
but still difficult. Speech synthesis is tolerable, so we are
putting things out that can start describing a dialogue. For
example, describing in a semantic web way what you have just
ordered from the pizza delivery site."
Not everything in the development of the semantic web is
progressing as smoothly as Berners-Lee hoped. "Collaborative
technology is not moving as fast as we would like," he said. "Among
the reasons for the slow pace is the need for web access control
and the need to roll back changes. It needs a lot of support
technology that IT people will know how to do."
In addition, the constructive tension between standards and the
urge to innovate in a non-standard way creates the danger of
fragmentation. But this is nothing new to Berners-Lee.
"When tables were introduced to HTML there were four or five
different approaches, but as soon as it moved to one standard it
was open and everyone could add to it," he said.
For businesses using and developing web-based activities,
Berners-Lee said, "Data is the core of the enterprise and will last
longer than technology." Corporate users do not want to be tied to
a particular platform, he said.
Spam
For someone held in such high esteem, it is reassuring to know that
Berners-Lee suffers from the same ailment as the rest of us. His
inbox is flooded with spam and he supports a crackdown on
spammers.
Spoofing, where spammers fraudulently change addresses to make
their messages appear to be from someone else, particularly
frustrates Berners-Lee. "This undermines the e-mail system. We must
prosecute cheats," he said.
However, he said spam was not a web problem. "E-mail was around
before the web, and e-mail is the problem with spam."
Dealing with junk e-mail requires both technology and policy
measures. Berners-Lee said e-mail software should be able to
distinguish between data and programs.
"Data just sits, whereas programs do things. Some e-mail software
does not distinguish. It lets you click on a harmless picture just
as easily as you would on something that will destroy your
machine," he said.
For Berners-Lee, the web works because of its universality which
ensures accessibility. A web access initiative is an integral part
of the W3C's work. The organisation is tasked with ensuring the web
is device-independent and future-proofed so that it can adapt to
new situations, can accommodate different personal styles and
provide indexing based on captions.
"Accessibility is not just about websites," he said, "It is also
about the browsers and media players and how they interact with
screen readers, as well as making tools easy to use."
CV: Tim Berners-Lee
A graduate of Oxford University, Tim Berners-Lee holds the 3Com
founder's chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
He directs the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of
companies and organisations with the mission to lead the web to its
full potential.
Berners-Lee has a background of system design in real-time
communications and text processing software development. In 1989 he
invented the world wide web while working at Cern, the European
Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client
(browser-editor) and server in 1990.
Before moving to Cern, Berners-Lee worked with Image Computer
Systems and before that was a principal engineer with Plessey
Telecommunications in Poole.
The W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium was created to lead the web to its
full potential by developing common protocols to promote its
evolution and ensure interoperability.
The WC3 is an international industry consortium jointly run by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology IT Laboratory for Computer
Science in the US, the European Research Consortium for Informatics
and Mathematics, headquartered in France, and Keio University in
Japan.
The W3C provides a repository of information about the web for
developers and users and various prototype and sample applications
to demonstrate the use of new technology. More than 400
organisations are members of the consortium.
www.w3.org