The internet owes its success to people as much as
technology,Tim
Berners-Lee, father of the world wide web said
today.
"A huge amount of the design of the web is the social element,"
he told a conference at London's Royal Society of Arts. "When you
design for the [internet] there are two pieces to the design. First
the hypertext link and HTML. That is the technical side. But then
you have the people."
People spend time researching and linking to other information
on the internet to make their pages valuable, creating what
Berners-Lee described as an economy of linking.
The same principles of making data available widely available
can be applied to other areas of IT, he said. "Enterprise software
is about getting the data out there [to users]. Just making the
data available will allow other people to reuse it and derive
additional value."
Academics have coined the term web science to describe the
latest research into the collaborative nature of successful web
technology.
The aim of the research is to look at what concepts are
workable, said Berners-Lee, and what ideas are destined to fail, by
scaling up to millions of users. He pointed to eBay as an
example.
"When eBay was set up, the designers had to second guess that
their star-rating system would work. "Today, this way of rating
buyers and sellers has created a scalable trust mechanism at the
centre of eBay's success.
Google is another obvious success story. Berners-Lee pointed out
that Google did some web science when the founders looked at the
fact that people could not find information. Google tackled this
problem and changed the web to made things findable.
Berners-Lee said that the
SMTP protocol used for e-mail was an example of a technical
breakthrough that has shown its limitations.
"SMTP had not been designed to authenticate the sender, so it
worked when there was a small community of people but has failed to
scale when the Internet was opened up to consumers."
"When we build web systems we should make them scale-free. Scale
issues of the web can impact software design," he said.
The
Web
science research initiative, a joint venture between
Southampton University and MIT, began in November 2006, to look at
why web inventions were successful.
Wendy Hall, a professor at Southampton University, said, "We
just see the web and use it. The time has come to understand how we
build systems for the web and ensure social benefits.
Web science is key to building modern IT systems said IBM senior
consultant Phil Tetlow. "The scale and complexity of today's IT
system are a challenge. No longer do computers work in a closed
system. Now they are open.
"Today we understand parts of the web very well but little
understanding of how it comes together, to direct all its traits
for greater good," he said.