Slide1

The future of the Web

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

http://www.w3.org/Talks/1999/0414-LCS35-tbl

Anniversary

• 35 Years of LCS
• 10 years of Web (35 Web years?)

This talk

1. The original dream: Rhyme and Reason
2. A little history
3. The universal information space
4. Documents and Data
5. Web of People

The Dream Phase I: Rhyme

Human communication though shared knowledge:

• Access for all
• The power to create hypertext
• Working together: Social efficiency, understanding and scaling

Dream Phase II: Reason

• Exploitation of computing power in real life
• Machine understandable data

History

1989 - Conception
1990 - "WorldWideWeb" browser/editor, server
1991 - Justification
1992 - Persuasion
1993 - Proliferation
1994 - Consortium
1996,7 - PNG, PICS, HTTP 1.1, HTML 3.2, 4.0, CSS,
1998,9 - XML, RDF, P3P, CSS2, IPR?, HTTP-NG, ...

Universal Space

• Anything can refer to anything
• Independent of everything else
• Minimalist design

Independence

• Hardware platform
• Software platform
• Human interface
• Language and Culture
• Quality level
• Subjective notions of "quality"
• Documents and Data

Documents vs Data

• Presentation - Ideal for human communication
• Content - Machine-aided human communication
• Data - Machine communication

Human communication through shared knowledge

"documents"

• Complex languages
• Unpredictability
• Intuition

Intercreative space

Being creative with others

• As you can read, so can you write
• If you notice a connection, make a link
• Software hard, needs stable infrastructure

Machine communication

"data"

• Well-defined meaning
• Definable results - eg bank transfer
• Logical Deduction

Screen scraping today

• Data in relational database eg product catalog/price list
• Report generator makes virtual hypertext pages
• Robot surfs web pages
• Screen scraper extracts data from web page
• Application interfaces to dummy database

spot the problem

Semantic Web

• XML with namespaces ==> extensible
• Self-describing documents => meaning well defined
• Combine vocabularies
• Extension without ambiguity
• Partial understanding
• Digital signature -> web of trust

Scaling human communication

• Web broke most structures
• Dramatic change for individual
• Can we scale human intuition?

Scaling machine communication

• Similar web assumptions
• Anything can refer to anything
• Maintain predicable systems
• Allow world to be unpredictable

Machines and people together

• Not AI but asking people to talk data.
• Digital signature backed up by web of trust
• Mixture of predictable mechanisms and heuristics

Web of people

• Weaving ourselves into the web
• Finding social machines - social structure
• Raising the ethical level

Thank you

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