The man credited with inventing the World Wide Web told a technology conference September 29 that getting the tech players to agree on computers’ communicating with each other under common standards is the key to making the Web more useful.
For Tim Berners-Lee it also means the Internet industry avoiding temptation, especially the temptation, as he put it, to tie up critical technologies with stringent royalty demands.
Finding a way to common standards was the same obstacle stared down the original development of the World Wide Web, he told an Emerging Technologies Conference gathering of 500, and it now challenges the early development of what he calls the Semantic Web, a process aimed at making more kinds of data easier for computers to find and negotiate.
"It's all about standards," he told the conference, hosted at Massachussetts Institute of Technology, from where he runs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). "Standards are the basis for any emergent technology."
Berners-Lee said surfers should be able to “manipulate” the Web “to intelligently steer them to data” which means something to them specifically, rather than just links to things “related” to what interests them.
He said his idea of the future includes encoding information to enable a computer to understand data and link it to multiple applications “seamlessly,” adding information automatically to calendars or address books, among other functions, and with Web data carrying tags to give meaning and make it easier for computers to search.
Those and other developments, he said, could let search engines not just find data but point you to where you’re most likely to look next, with software written in due course to process data and infer what usually required a human hand and eye.
