Tim Berners-Lee Discusses the Future of the Web 112
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 year... (Score:2, Insightful)
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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 st
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Ob Mony Python reference... (Score:1, Funny)
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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 wher
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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
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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.
My predictions -- write these down! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:My predictions -- write these down! (Score:4, Funny)
Dude, you are so anti-semantic!
Or more simply... (Score:1)
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The internet was about the individual in the 90s. The 21st century is all about corporations and commercialism, while convincing individuals that it's really
Re:My predictions -- write these down! (Score:5, Insightful)
The 21st century is all about corporations and commercialism, while convincing individuals that it's really "their" society, political systems, freedom, etc.
There, fixed that for you.
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Control!? (Score:2)
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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 has tried to shut my sites down. Nobody has tried to coerce or prevent others from accessing my sites.
And you can thank the current fragile state of Net Neutrality for that.
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My own predictions (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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'.
Re:My own predictions (Score:4, Funny)
A quick Google search shows that you're safe, anyway.
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I'm basically theorizing that with KDE and Mozilla, among many others, combining to support the Semantic Desktop and web; with Apple having implemented KDE code in Dashboard and Safari and working with them, the Semantic Web has a chance to at least be tried. One day Opera and IE will s
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Heaps of people remain on slow connections to the Internet across the world meaning that they are cut off from more and more of this new "good" Internet.
Considering that it is impossible to get cheap broadband (and the only way to get broadband is satellite) in so many places in Australia (a "first world" "developed" country) and the situation is apparently similar in the USA, I think we should focus on actually getting people connected before we start going on about video and interactive web prog
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not buzz-rific enough (Score:5, Funny)
That vision is nonsense. I don't see any Web 2.0 buzzwords on that paper anywhere.
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Maybe We should be talking about terms like "Web (2.0 + i)" and "Web (2.0 + 2.0i)"?
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The nerve. (Score:2)
rejected (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:rejected (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me a break
In fact, Google is a model here. They are making it ridiculously easy to get access to data in all kinds of formats. I can create a google spreadsheet and actually share individual cells and ranges of cells with anyone else on the internet, and it even retains the dynamic calculations from the main spreadsheet even when you aren't displaying the rest of the cells. It's actually ridiculously cool if you think about it.
The smart companies absolutely will make it easier and easier to access their data in all kinds of formats.
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Seriously, I'm not much of an Office user nor do I use Google Apps. Is there something new or different about the way google does it, beyond the just 1 calorie, not evil enough difference?
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I am talking about a live view of your document from Google Docs. Set aside the awesome ability to be able to share it with collaborators where you're all editing it at the same time. This thing also lets you publish cells and cell ranges, for anyone to view or for
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Seems the major difference is Cost of Operating the host (including MS License fun) versus Desire for exclusive control over the documents themselves (as in physically). Guess it depends on people
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These user-driven efforts are where the tagging and semantic web will probably start. If Wikipedia contributors care to take the time to write good articles, then surely they will also be willing to semantically tag articles. (In fact Wikipedia already has alot of semantic tagging.) Similarly creative commons artists are actively tagging their works with machine-readable creative-commons tags. Social sites like Flickr are also doing alot of useful tagging.
So businesses may resist it... but as long as users care about it (and are given easy to tools to make it happen--like wikis), then this semantic web can be created. Once it expands, businesses will have to play along or risk being left behind and ignored by the web-users who come to depend upon the power of the Semantic Web. So, whether they like it or not, businesses will have to connect to the semantic web and add to its descriptive power, or else they will lose all their customers.
And, yes, I'm keenly aware of the flip-side, which is that businesses will then try to commoditize and monetize these technologies, sometimes in bad ways, like Spam. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. But I don't think businesses will be able to stop it.
I disagree. Or rather, I think that describes only some users. There are plenty of users who are care about content. (Wikipedia and free software are examples of the resultant projects.) So even if many (or most) users don't care about the semantic web, as long as some dedicated group does care, then it will expand and everyone (including users who don't care about the underlying implementation details) will benefit.
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There's a
Semantic Web == Exchange (Score:2)
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
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I wouldn't call it impossible. It
Re:Semantic Web !== Exchange (Score:2)
Achieving it for 'stuff' in general, which seems to be the aim of the Semantic Web, is probably flat-out impossible.
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
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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
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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
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That said, I think impossible might be too strong a word, but it's certainly a moving target.
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I doubt it's impossible. You just need some intelligent filtering algorithms. Think of Google's fault-tolerant searches: if I accidentally spell 'Mississippi' as 'Misisipi' Google will ask, 'did you mean Mississippi?'. It's not exactly rocket science. And it's not much of a leap from that to software that can look at a web page displaying, say, times and dates and addresses and, even tho
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I dunno about "impossible": web browsers, MIME types, and helper applications have done quite a bit of it for a lot wider variety of disparate types of linked information than MS Office has. I'm not
Re:Semantic Web == Exchange (Score:4, Interesting)
You're talking about OLE, where Microsoft only allowed the combination and transfer of data objects (and otherwise reusing application code) from one application to another. You could take an Excel worksheet and paste it into a Word document. That's pretty cool, and at useful once in a long while, but it's hardly smart enough to be compared to Semantic Web. The web equivalent is simply embedding images and Flash games- i.e. Web 1.0.
At work I get many emails about upcoming internal conferences, tech talks, vendor presentations and such. They all come in the form of an Outlook email, but contain data including event title, date/time, location, and more recognizable bits of information. But when I drag the email onto a calendar folder to create a "Meeting" object, none of the data is put in the appropriate fields. That's the kind of thing Semantic Web is supposed do.
The stuff Microsoft had was useful, but it's obsolete today. It only provided the ability to share data between one application and another application. Today we need to share data between any of millions of applications (web sites), and we can't afford to write dedicated code for each one of those. We need the Semantic Web.
> Achieving it for 'stuff' in general, which seems to be the aim of the Semantic Web, is probably flat-out impossible.
"Ingenuity and resourcefulness" my foot. You don't even make an argument against it, not to mention any attempt at proof. Since don't even understand what the Semantic Web is about, how could you possibly dismiss it so casually?
But I must stop and thank you. Pessimists like you make us real technologists so much cooler. It's great to hear people say "it can't be done," because it makes solving those problems so much sweeter. My prediction: expect some serious in-your-face fist-pumping.
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I work for the US government, currently on a semantic web research project. For the last ten years I've consistently worked on the kind of hard problems most people rarely encounter, and worked on systems you couldn't imagine. Yeah, I'm not an old fart who worked with punch cards, but a look back at the last decade provides nothing for which to be ashamed.
Your turn, coward.
Bingo! (Score:1)
Over hyped before they had a decent implementation, and now that we use them everywhere we find we still don't have flying cars.
Semantic Web in use for at least a decade. (Score:2)
The semantic web has been in use since somewhere between 1996 and 1998, since Google relies on the semanticity of the HTML hyperlink syntax.
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Whew (Score:5, Funny)
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The new Symantec Web 2008 is much better, and can do so much more in one package!
not as offtopic as it seemed (Score:2, Informative)
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 b
Baah - Semantic Web is overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Google is spending a ton of money working on exactly that.
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Yeah - but I was thinking of something beyond keyword or proximity search. Something, er, semantic. But actually semantic, not like the semantic web. Something that could spot correlations across complex documents or organize the information beyond a top 10 list of hits or actually answer questions. While useful, keyword search hardly provides the rich semantic environment needed to organize the world's information.
I'm sure Google is working on t
Building a knowledge commons (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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We don't. RDF triples are claims about specific resources, including other websites, data sources, or even specific other RDF triples. No reason you can't used signed RDF to make accountable claims about the trustworthiness of resources (metadata sources at any level of specificity down to
Talk about prior art!!! (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be cool to read the rest of the document for other prior net related prior art?
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Let's take a microsecondext (Score:2)
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!
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Net Neutrality should be Amendment to Constitution (Score:1, Interesting)
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" ca
deployment (Score:2)
Non statement (Score:1)
semantic web is being invented now (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Generic containers like Atom and microformats are useful, but we really lack an interoperable medium for conveying managed data - ie. Stuff that's been normalized for manipulation and integrity. Not that it should be the only form for all data, but that most data should be able to be gleaned into something like RDF.
The world of course will progress without RDF or SPARQL, but they certainly look to remove a fair amount effort in inter
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Right. RDF is for relationships a lot like what XML is for structure of data, a common way of expressing things so that tools that don't need to know or care about the ultimate use of data can pr
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The Web? (Score:2)
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.
That would be SIR Tim Berners Lee (Score:1)
gov't accuracy (Score:1)
uh, no thanks. I think you'll be wrong on that one, Tim.
Tim Berners-Lee Discusses the Future of the Web... (Score:2)
News at Eleven.
It always makes me laugh.... (Score:1)
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