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| Opening Keynote - The Semantic Web |
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SPEAKER:
Tim Berners-Lee
Senior Research Scientist
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT
Director, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Knight of the British Empire
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ABOUT THE LECTURE:
It’s hard to keep up with the mastermind of the World Wide Web. In his fast-paced address, Tim Berners-Lee not only recaps the origins of the Internet, but sketches its future. The Web began as “a primeval soup of many things that know each other but haven’t been put together,” says Berners-Lee. In the late 1980s, he began experimenting with a way for fellow physicists to exchange information. According to Berners-Lee, the invention of uniform resource identifiers and hyper text markup language was critical to the Internet’s phenomenal success. “HTML would be the warp and weft of the web, and within it, the jewels would be movies, and pictures and databases and …other formats that would evolve.” Here’s what’s coming: the “semantic web,” a way of indexing and linking together different kinds of web content. He envisions computers becoming even more useful, deploying a common, non-proprietary “resource description framework” that enables them to draw connections between disparate sorts of information. “What’s nifty”, says Berners-Lee “is putting links between objects and even concepts. It allows a query on one database to morph into a query into others.” He imagines the semantic web emerging as a “killer application” in the life sciences, where correlating data from different fields has become increasingly critical.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
A 1976 graduate of Oxford University, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing. Today he leads the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations with the mission to lead the Web to its full potential. Berners-Lee wrote the first web client (browser-editor) and server in 1990 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Before coming to CERN, Tim worked with Image Computer Systems, of Ferndown, Dorset, England and before that as a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications, in Poole, England.
Tim Berners-Lee has received numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Charles Babbage award, the Electronic Freedom Foundation's pioneer award and the Japan Prize from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan. In 2004 Tim was listed in the New Year’s honors list for a knighthood (KBE) for services to the global development of the Internet and was awarded the first Millennium Technology Prize. He was knighted by H.M. the Queen on 16th July, 2004.
Berners-Lee page at CSAIL
World Wide Web Consortium site
NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 58:03.
R. Bruce Journey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Technology Review, introduces the event.
At 3:22, Jason Pontin, Editor-in-Chief, Technology Review, introduces Tim Berners-Lee.
At 3:47, Tim Berners-Lee begins.
At 38:25, Q&A begins, with Bob Metcalfe, Founder, 3Com Corporation, and General Partner, Polaris Venture Partners, moderating.
At 48:03 Metcalfe asks Berners-Lee, "What web browser do you use?"
The information on this page was accurate as of the day the video was added to MIT World. This video was added to MIT World on 2004-11-16.
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