Issue 4 Summer 008
Snippets
THE WORLD WIDE WEB CELEBRATED ITS 15TH Nigel Shadbolt who is professor of Computer Science
BIRTHDAY ON 30 APRIL 2008 at the University of Southampton estimates that 80%
30 April 1993 was the day that CERN released the World of all content is now user generated and only 20% is
Wide Web into the public domain, ensuring that the world enterprise. His view is: “The future is the Semantic Web,
would have a single system for accessing the Internet. or Web 3.0. At the moment what you have to do is
This was achieved by a statement that renounced the do some smart searching, and integrate through a lot of
intellectual property rights to the web but stated that no documents that are offered up to you, Web 3.0 will be
one else could claim them. (see http://tenyears-www. able to do a lot of that information brokering for you.”
web.cern.ch/tenyears-www/Declaration/Page1.html)
Robert Cailliau who worked on the development of the web
To celebrate this birthday, the BBC asked 10 leading with Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN has concerns however
figures in the web community about their hopes for and states “We need to figure out the social impact of
the future of the web (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ the Semantic Web. I am not sure this is a good thing. I
technology/7373717.stm ). It is clear from their responses don’t know who is controlling it. And because it works
that the web is now so prevalent and looms so large in by ontologies, who decides on what basis I am going to
our future that there is no single answer. see things? I would also like the economics of web to be
controlled between authors and readers, not advertisers.”
For instance Wendy Hall, professor of Computer Science
at the University of Southampton says, “Everything Sir Tim himself says “What’s exciting is that people are
is going mobile. In the next two or three years, the building new social systems, new systems of review,
technology and the interfaces will change so that the new systems of governance. My hope is that those will
Web is much more accessible on a mobile device.” produce new ways of working together effectively and
fairly which we can use globally to manage ourselves as
Whereas Dr. David G. Belanger, AT&T Labs’ Chief a planet.”
Scientist, has the opinion that; “We’re moving towards
real time communication, voice and interactive media. When another 15 years have passed and the web is both
Figuring out how to manage all of these new things, beyond 3.0 and 30 who can truly guess at all the ways it
without losing performance is the largest challenge.” will be used? What we can say with confidence is that
our future and that of the web are connected in a way that
There are also different views on the Semantic Web, a cannot be separated. That is not what CERN expected in
way to organise and access unstructured data that is 1993. According to Robert Cailliau, “It was never our aim
being evangelised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor to extend it beyond the academic community.”
of the World Wide Web.
 | Perspectives on technology
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28