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Tim Berners-Lee Discusses the Future of the Web
maximus1 writes "In an interview with IT World, Tim Berners-Lee explains his vision of the Semantic Web. He says: 'The Semantic Web is going to take off particularly when we see people using it for data processing, when we see people using it in more and more things, adding personal data, adding files to government data.' His position on net neutrality: 'We've seen cable companies trying to prevent using the Internet for Internet phones. I am concerned about this, and am working, with many other committed people, to keep it from happening. I think it's very important to keep an open Internet for whoever you are. This is called Net neutrality. It's very important to preserve Net neutrality for the future.' And a fun tidbit — He mentions his 1989 memo to his boss at CERN that described his vision for the Web."
...another "Tim Berners-Lee discusses the semantic web" article.
I predict that, in the future, the web will be used to for vast amounts of pornography, insane conspiricy theories, niche interest "news" sites that protect their users from anything that might challenge their worldview and to allow regular people to flourish in the utter jackassery that results from anonymity.
It will also have an interesting side effect where long-time users sit down to write a post intended to be humorous and end up making themselves a little depressed.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
And a fun tidbit -- He mentions his 1989 memo to his boss at CERN that described his vision for the Web.
That vision is nonsense. I don't see any Web 2.0 buzzwords on that paper anywhere.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
He acts like he owns the place or something, not content to just be a part of a global phenomenon.. I kid, I kid, he's far too humble a genius and should be installed as the global overlord, pronto!
You probably are developing some 'roids.
*Flush*
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
At best, nobody gives a damn.
Businesses actively work to prevent other sites from scraping content. They certainly aren't going to spend extra effort to support it!
Users care about presentation. Looks are everything. Web developers know this, or at least the marketing people in charge of web design know it.
From TFA:
So, for example, if you are looking at a Web page, you find a talk that you want to take, an event that you want to go to. The event has a place and has a time and it has some people associated with it. But you have to read the Web page and separately open your calendar to put the information on it. And if you want to find the page on the Web you have to type the address again until the page turns back. If you want the corporate details about people, you have to cut and paste the information from a Web page into your address book, because your address book file and your original data files are not integrated together. And they are not integrated with the data on the Web. So the Semantic Web is about data integration.
When you use an application, you should be able to put data there so that you could configure that data. I should be able to inform my computer: "I'm going to that event." And when I say that, the machine will understand the data.
Hey, a description of the Exchange / Office / Outlook toolchain. I can read a document, it has a link to an appointment, associated with that is a second document that contains embedded video, meanwhile the sender's address is added to my address book and the appointment to my calendar...
Of course, it took MS quite a while to achieve this in the reasonably constrained environment of office automation, and even then it was a huge achievement that many companies failed hideously at. Achieving it for 'stuff' in general, which seems to be the aim of the Semantic Web, is probably flat-out impossible.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
- No one will ever figure out what Tim Berners-Lee is rambling on about with the semantic Web thingie.
- The Net will continue to feature more video, become even more interactive, and the difference between local apps and the Internet will continue to be blurred little-by-little.
- Blogs will continue in various fashions, from vlogs (video blogs) to audlogs (audio logs) to iBlogs (blogs with highly-interactive content, including even 3D simulated environments). Apple will sue the first person that uses the term 'iBlog'.
- Devices will continue to converge. Specialized devices will exist, and regular desktop and laptop computers will continue to exist, but the differences between them will blur as it becomes apparent that the only difference from a practical standpoint will be form factor and user interface.
- The telcos will become less relevant as Net connectivity becomes all that matters.
- THe mafiaa becomes irrelevant as people become increasingly connected to artists.
- Spam will become ever increasingly more annoying as advertising will even start popping up on your roll of toilet 'paper'.
My blog
"Semantic Web" is right up there with old buzzwords like "Push technology" and "Voice over IP".
Over hyped before they had a decent implementation, and now that we use them everywhere we find we still don't have flying cars.
For a second there I thought he said Symantec Web and said to myself "We're all doomed."
Mandriva's Announcement Mandriva and the NEPOMUK Consortium are extending the scope of the project by bridging existing initiatives related to desktop metadata management to make semantic features interoperable between different technologies. Mandriva is also leading the implementation of similar features on top of the Eclipse RCP and the Mozilla XUL frameworks
Once again someone is trying to tell us how the future is going to unwind. The semantic web has always been a great idea, and I would love to see it implemented, but we have been hearing about how this is the future of the internet for almost 10 years now...and still no large movement to implement it.
Personal data issues are covered in this document. This is a change in how most people who talk about the semantic web discount security concerns. But he still didn't touch on deliberate or accidental mis-use of public data. Just by simply making a mistake at one location in the semantic web means a ton of people suddenly have erroneous data. For instance if I put the wrong date for my birthday party and everyone uses their computer to imput this data, their calendars are going to be wrong and they may actually not check the data since they rely on their computers to do it for them. So everyone shows up at the wrong time for my birthday party...
Granted that may be a bad example, but what about deliberate misuse of data? When you set-up computers to basically read things for themselves, you remove that extra layer of redundancy when you read over your data just to make sure it checks out..
Great idea on paper, but its going to take a lot of work in this for me to be convinced it will work in the real world.
Sure - life would be so much easier if everyone spoke the same language and all businesses worked together for a common good. And everyone used Linux and open standards and shared data. But, then again, any structured approach would work well in this environment or in other closed communities where everyone agrees on XML and API standards already.
But give me something to work with the vast amounts of unstructured information out there - not just the generic header information surrounding the really interesting stuff. I'm just hoping that Web 3.0 focuses more on this area to support a real information revolution rather than just over-formatting the already semi-structured pieces of data that we already know about.
"Semantic Web" is right up there with old buzzwords like "Push technology" and "Voice over IP".
The semantic web has been in use since somewhere between 1996 and 1998, since Google relies on the semanticity of the HTML hyperlink syntax.
Tweet, tweet.
Perhaps he can get Verizon to stop blocking port 80 on FIOS.
Why should it be impossible?
I always thought that this kind of thing is what standards are for. So lets create a 5-tuple with (date, place,event,persons,data), push this data through some xml into something called OEDF (Open Event data format) and Voila, tag it to every mentioning of said event. You just have to click ok 5 times(remember the first time Fry visited the Net in the year 3000), if your app detects such an oedf-object anywhere, and voila, with the magic of Ajax, Web2.0 and some scripting the event will appear in you calendar, your googleearth will get another layer, your adressbook gets 5 new adresses, your blog gets another entry and the most important thing I get 5 cent for every occurence of this happening in the furture. :-) Dips on this idea!
And no: Semantic Web equals not Exchange, it's just that TIMTOWTDI and some of the ways may look alike.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
In spirit, I see commonality between Larry Lessig's desire to build a commons of information that can be shared and built on, and Tim Berners-Lee's desire to build a a platform for data integration that people can build new applications on. For all of my enthusiasm for the semantic web (I have had RDF meta data on my web site for many years), there are some tough problems, including:
1. trust: how do we keep people from publishing purposefully wrong meta data?
2. how do we reason with a web's worth of data? Even with recent advances in technology for descriptive logic reasoner's, reasoning with web scale data is not even close to being possible. Even the RDF extracted from Wikipedia is way too large to reason over.
3. tension between formal standards and "grass roots" bottom up approaches that work, but may not scale. I expect that some "grass roots" efforts will become very popular and perhaps replace RDF and OWL as the semantic web data model. Speaking of which, one of my favorite ideas that I have seen widely discussed: extending HTML/XHTML so that meta data is encoded in standardized attribute names representing agreement/disagreement, trust level, type of linked information, time stamp, etc. Combine this with RDF, but have a better way to embed RDF into HTML and XHTML.
Not sure if I missed some kind of sarcasm, but if there is one person in the world who understands what web means, the name of this person is Tim Berners-Lee.
ilex paraguariensis for all
Not the internet, but he did invent the web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
Wouldn't it be cool to read the rest of the document for other prior net related prior art?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Okay I forgot to say that by "this" I mean semantic desktop, which would naturally be related to Tim Berners-Lee's prediction of the future including the semantic web.
I was typing two things at once and only proofread for typos. Not coherence unfortunately.
Basically, while not challenging OSX or Windows, KDE4 has a lot of users realative to the number of users who would normally be involved in implementing semantic anything.
At the same time as the semantic desktop will be available, the functionality will be compatible with Mozilla (Firefox Web Browser) and their XUL (an XML implementation for their User Interface.)
I wasn't trying to promote KDE4, which is months away, or Mandriva, which I don't use. It's just really cool for those of us who've been looking forward to a semantic web where words will have more meaning. It seems like it might start with KDE users and as it grows spread to Firefox. And since the crucial parts of Apple's Safari and Dashboard are Open Source and based on KDE code, Mac users may be included in on this fairly quickly.
The future of the Web...hmmm.. that's a toughie...
1) Porn - check
2) Email - check
3) Spam - check
4) Viruses and Trojans - check
5) 99.8% of all blogs being dull, pointless and full of misplaced ego - check
Semantics - nope: people will still mix up 'effect' and 'affect', and use 'loose' when they mean 'lose'
Next!
AT&ROFLMAO
Net Neutrality should be an Amendment to Constitution.
The reason why? Because as in amendment it would be the only way to protect the internet against a political party taking over and changing everything, and then other parties making the freedom of the internet a political football. One year the internet could be free, then the next it could be not free, then the next... would be a guess depending on how much money the cable and telephone companies can spend to keep their "keep the internet not free" canidates in office...!!!
A constitutional amendment needs to be put through a 2/3rds vote process (something that 2/3rds of the citizens would approve of)... then to undo the amendment you would need 2/3rds again to undo it... this would be difficult to do (meaning that freedom of the internet could be protected the same as "free speech" "freedom of the press" and other natural and expected freedoms (for "free" countries).
the best way to get this to take off is to get some of these ideas implemented on sites like wikipedia.org and youtube. the true power of the semantic web will show itself in large scale applications such as these.
Yes you fixed all those posters who come out of the woodwork every time slashdot has a story about the third world and the internet.
So lets create a 5-tuple with (date, place,event,persons,data)
Well an event already has a place and a time/date associated with it. So we have (#event -> #time -> "11am") and (#event -> #place -> "Meeting Hall). So all you are left with for saying that a person is attending/did attend is another relationship, (#person -> #attend -> #event). So you've expressed the information in a series of relationships between two entities - which is exactly what RDF does. Suddenly you don't need your new OEDF format, you just need RDF and software that understands the relationships #time, #place and #attend. OEDF software also needs to understand these concepts, but it also needs to solve the data format problem. It's more code to write.
The trouble with the Semantic Web is that TBL is always talking about the end goal. The end goal seems unobtainable to many people. But the way the Semantic Web is working, it's solving one small problem at a time (such as the representation of generic relationships, with RDF) in a general way, which means that everybody can build on that foundation, have less code to write, and can spend their time solving bigger problems.. Now eventually we might get much smarter software, but the Semantic Web is quite sensibly solving a little bit at a time.
Well let me tell you, the Europeans figured out this would happen, which is why they developed a bizarre invention that shoots water up your backside.
It is apparently great for washing, with the only unintended side effect being that it makes you gay, causing your country to suffer declining birthrates, and propels you to invite Islamic radical PHDs into your country so you can watch them catch themselves on fire.
I am hoping mine makes it to me from my Amazon order ASAP.
The definition of "taking off" is that people of using it. So he basically said that we will know that people are using it when we see that people are using it.
Yes. And if there's one person in the world who understands what networks mean, the name of this person is Bob Metcalfe. I'm sure anything he has to predict about the future of the Internet MUST be right.
The semantic web is being invented now. Only not by Tim Berners Lee et al. The W3C has been side tracked for quite some time by this semantic web thing. Time has been wasted on pointless things such as XHTML, RDF, OWL, etc. Outside the labs, in the real world, a lot more progress is being made. There's millions of geotagged photos, places, wikipedia articles, etc. You can search for hcalendar events on Yahoo, hresumes on linked in, people on facebook and pictures of cats on flickr. Social networks are all about meta information. These applications are now starting to link and integrate each other. That effectively is the birth of the semantic web. It will be a heterogenous patchwork of information applications and services.
If you want a glimpse of what the semantic web will look like, fire up Google Earth. Sure it is proprietary but it is also massively distributed meta information from all over the internet aggregated into one coherent view overlayed on top of the world. Imagine that based on open standards, and you get an idea of where we could be going.
Emerging standards such as microformats, atom, openid may lack the glamour of all encompassing ontologies and the mighty AI of reasoning engines and what not. But, the bottom line is that they are a hell of a lot more practical and pragmatic, solve real problems, and you can use them right now. These emerging standards are not perfect or even complete but people are definitely using them to enrich information on the internet by cross referencing; by tagging; by labeling etc. Defacto standardization outside W3C by killer applications is driving this lower case semantic web. The best thing the W3C could do and currently does not is to endorse, facilitate and promote this work.
Tim Berners Lee of course contributed his bit by inventing the web browser + very naive markup language (aka HTML 1.0) in 1989. I give him credit for his vision then but this article reads like a very confused mix of ideals and vague concepts and does not seem visionary at all. The man tries to explain things in terms of databases, files and links and somehow the wizards at MIT are going to provide the magic pixie dust that turns it into something beautiful. That's nice but the how part remains ever elusive.
Jilles
(Looking back from the future)
I remember the Web. That was when there were still ISPs and telecoms, right? Back when the big corporations tried to figure out how to triple, and quadruple charge for everything. When governments started taxing every packet. Back before the Mesh. Yeah, that sucked.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
That would be SIR Tim Berners-Lee, thank you very much.
Too much Law; not enough Order.
You just solved it for date-based events. The GP talked about "stuff in general". Now come up with a solution that encompasses all possible future data requirements (not XML, since that is not specific to any single application).
That said, I think impossible might be too strong a word, but it's certainly a moving target.
I'm running a pirated copy of Linux.
Is this really a problem with the Semantic Web?
Seems to me that its a problem with the people that are reacting emotionally to TBLs descriptions of the ultimate goal without paying attention to the progress in that direction, and with the people who think that the Semantic Web is somehow all or nothing such that if the vision is less than entirely acheived, the effort toward it is completely wasted, whereas in reality "semantic-ness" of the web is a continuum.
..propels you to invite Islamic radical PHDs into your country so you can watch them catch themselves on fire.
Hey, I'd pay to see Islamic radicals pour petrol over themselves and ignite it. That'd beat anything on ITV for a start!
uh, no thanks. I think you'll be wrong on that one, Tim.
Well of course, because we all know Al Gore invented the Internet!
OK, explain to me what your definition of "control" is. I've created several websites - several brand new ones just in the past few months. Nobody stopped me. I've placed pretty much whatever I wanted on those websites. Nobody stopped me. Thousands of people are visiting those websites. Nobody is stopping them. Nobody is 'controlling' their 'clicks'. Nobody has tried to shut my sites down. Nobody has tried to coerce or prevent others from accessing my sites. ANYONE CAN DO THIS. I'm just not getting the "control" part. Actually we have unprecedented freedom in this regard, and it's increasing all the time. I couldn't do this just a few decades ago, now I can attract an audience of thousands worldwide without even moving from my chair for whatever content I want. It's not zero-sum. You too have the power to put whatever you want on the Internet, and as long as it's basically legal, none of those big evil corporations that supposedly "control" the Internet are going to stop you, nor are they going to stop anyone from visiting those sites.
...as usual.
News at Eleven.
Not sure if I missed some kind of sarcasm, but if there is one person in the world who understands what web means, the name of this person is Tim Berners-Lee.
No, Tim understands what he *wanted* the web to be. He's a very intelligent man, but he is by no means the difinitive word on what the web means.
The people that use the web are. The web is a place defined by the people who view and put content on it. Those people have found uses for the web that Berners-Lee never imagined.
Tim may think he knows where things are going or how they should happen, but he doesn't necessarily.
Yes, his accomplishments are impressive and his opinion is valued. However, he shouldn't be looked to as the difinitive word on something that effectively has a life of its own.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
"Old buzzwords like Voice over IP"? That must be the most ridiculous antiprogressive uttering I've heard on Slashdot in days!
Ever heard of Skype? Ventrilo? And the huge range of corporate products and broadband telephony offerings relying on similar principles?
Get a grib, freaking luddites.
Actually his name is Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He was knighted in 2004.
I'll allow someone else of the further pedantery of his full first name, middle name and letters, but the 'Sir' thing is his name now.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Well, I don't understand all and sundry writing off folks who have created history and are impacting our lifes to quite an extent .
c hnologies/index.html/) and have solutions in place to support what is being touted as "Semantic web"
This is impacting the Systems integration business in a big way already and impacting industries such as Pharma, Oil & gas , and other information intensive businesses in a major way!!!
Look around and ask the right people and you'd come to know...
No, Tim understands what he *wanted* the web to be. He's a very intelligent man, but he is by no means the difinitive word on what the web means. The people that use the web are. The web is a place defined by the people who view and put content on it. Those people have found uses for the web that Berners-Lee never imagined.
If you DID READ the actual article, he simply states that web is an infrastructure and people would always be come to use the system and provide solutions which nobody(of course including him) ever imagined. All he is saying now is the Web Infrastructure is moving in a certain direction, which he chose to call as "Semantic web". This new infrastructure would provide more expressiveness, real-world information modeling , easier information integration and increasing reasoning capabilities. And of course MORE OPPORTUNITIES..... Just a small proof of his claims, prime software vendors are already moving in this direction( http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/semantic_te
Tim Berners-Lee is smart and a fun guy to listen to. But he doesn't have any idea of what the web or computers or cereal boxes will look like in even 2 decades time than I do. Every time I hear anyone talking about what the future will be like, I always remind myself that the jet-packs never arrived either....
http://timcol6.freehostia.com/
I think we can all agree he wouldn't want to be looked to as the difinitive word on anything.