Working to turn the Web semantic

KUALA LUMPUR: Do you think the Web, e-mail and e-payments have made your life easier? Well, you haven’t seen anything yet.  

The World Wide Web will have even more to offer you in the future.

It will evolve into the Semantic Web within the next few years, according to the founder of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.  

“For example, a person may see an event he likes on the Internet and plan to go to it, the Semantic Web will then automatically pull the relevant data onto a personal spreadsheet or calendar,” he told the 1,000-odd delegates at the Global Leadership Forum here last week.

The potential benefits of the Semantic Web are that computers would be able to personalise the enormous amount of information on the Net for the needs of each individual.  

Here’s one other way how that would work. Your personal computer would be able to automatically find the nearest hairdresser to your home or office and book an appointment for you that fits in with your schedule.

Berners-Lee has been evangelising about the Semantic Web since 1999.

“I have a dream for the Web, in which computers, become capable of analysing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers,” he said back then, according to Wikipedia.

The basis of the Semantic Web, he said, would involve “machines talking to machines.” “The intelligent (web) agents people have touted for ages will finally materialise,” he added.

Berners-Lee lamented that it is just as hard today to convince people of the benefits of the Semantic Web as it was to convince them of the benefits of the World Wide Web in the 1980s.

“I spent four years trying to get people to adopt the Web,” he said. Video of the future
On the sidelines of the event, Berners-Lee told In.Tech that he believes video-streaming will take the Internet to another level as connectivity and data transfer speeds continue to improve.

When that happens, he said, “bloggers will be able to film first-hand accounts of situations and stream them to the world.” As for the darker side of the Internet, he said it is up to parents to guide their children; to teach them the difference between trustworthy and untrustworthy content.  

Touching on the current problems of respecting intellectual property on the Internet, Berners-Lee admits that this is one problem that he did not foresee when he came up with the protocol that would ease the exchange of information on the Web.

“We didn’t foresee it, but the problem was there; some people were already uploading stuff (that didn’t belong to them) onto FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers back in the 80s,” he said.

Today’s peer-to-peer networks (which are more efficient than FTP servers for data exchange) have made the problem more acute, according to him.  

“The jury is still out on what’s going to happen (with this situation),” he said. Berners-Lee is director of the World Wide Web Consortium which coordinates Web development worldwide. It works with teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, Keio University in Japan, and others.  

The consortium’s goal is to lead the Web to its full potential; a goal that is still close to Berners-Lee’s heart and he remains modest about his contribution.

“I came up with it (the World Wide Web) so people could work together, free of geography. I didn’t single-handedly change the world. I had a team with me. It was the system that changed the world,” he told In.Tech.

Berners-Lee built his first computer in 1976 with a soldering iron, a M6800 processor, and an old TV set before going on four years later to write the Enquire program which formed the basis for the World Wide Web.

The rest, as they say, is history.