p2pnet - rss feed: WWW creator wins knighthood
p2pnet.net News Feature:- For once, the media of the world agree on one thing:
That Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who devised the WorldWideWeb in 1989 while he was working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, deserves every accolade and every financial reward that comes his way.
Yesterday be was dubbed Knight by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and in April, he won the Finnish Technology Award Foundation’s first Millennium Technology Prize, worth $1.2 million.
However, Sir Tim has never sought money for what has to be one of, if not THE, most imporant creations of the 20th century.
He gave ordinary people everywhere the power to tap into the Net.
He founded the World Wide Web Consortium and is now a professor in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
However, the knighthood and Finnish prize don’t mean Sir Tim has stopped thinking about ways in which the Web can benefit the world.
These days he’s working on the Semantic Web - “an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation” as he, James Hendler and Ora Lassila put it in the Scientific American in May, 2001.
“The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users,” says their article, going on:
“The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”
Or as Clay Shirkey puts it: “The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms.”
Stay tuned, as they say.
