Article: 20th and 21st-century British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee (cropped).jpg
Sir Tim Berners Lee arriving at the Guildhall to receive the Honorary Freedom of the City of London
London, England, United Kingdom
University of Oxford (BA)
Turing Award (2016)
Queen Elizabeth Prize (2013)
Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (2009)
Order of Merit (2007)
ACM Software System Award (1995)
Conway Berners-Lee Mary Lee Woods CERN
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
World Wide Web Consortium
University of Oxford University of Southampton
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English engineer and computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He made a proposal for an information management system on 12 March 1989, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the internet in mid-November the same year.
Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation and is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com founders chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. In 2011, he was named as a member of the board of trustees of the Ford Foundation. He is a founder and president of the Open Data Institute, and is currently an advisor at social network MeWe.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. Named in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century, Berners-Lee has received a number of other accolades for his invention. He was honoured as the "Inventor of the World Wide Web" during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person, working with a vintage NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium. He tweeted "This is for everyone", which instantly was spelled out in Liquid-crystal display (LCD) lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience. Berners-Lee received the 2016 Turing Award "for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale".
Early life and education
Berners-Lee was born on 8 June 1955 in London, England, the eldest of the four children of Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee; his brother Mike is an expert on greenhouse gases. His parents were computer scientists who worked on the first commercially built computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. He attended Sheen Mount Primary School, and then went on to attend south west London's Emanuel School from 1969 to 1973, at the time a direct grant grammar school, which became an independent school in 1975. A keen trainspotter as a child, he learnt about electronics from tinkering with a model railway. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, from 1973 to 1976, where he received a first-class bachelor of arts degree in physics. While at university, Berners-Lee made a computer out of an old television set, which he bought from a repair shop.
Career and research
After graduation, Berners-Lee worked as an engineer at the telecommunications company Plessey in Poole, Dorset. In 1978, he joined D. G. Nash in Ferndown, Dorset, where he helped create type-setting software for printers.
Berners-Lee worked as an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980. While in Geneva, he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. To demonstrate it, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.
After leaving CERN in late 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth, Dorset. He ran the company's technical side for three years. The project he worked on was a "real-time remote procedure call" which gave him experience in computer networking. In 1984, he returned to CERN as a fellow.
In 1989, CERN was the largest internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the internet:
I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web ... Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system.
Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989 and, in 1990, redistributed it. It then was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall, who called his proposals 'vague, but exciting'. He used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first Web browser. His software also functioned as an editor (called WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon).
Mike Sendall buys a NeXT cube for evaluation, and gives it to Tim [Berners-Lee]. Tim's prototype implementation on NeXTStep is made in the space of a few months, thanks to the qualities of the NeXTStep software development system. This prototype offers WYSIWYG browsing/authoring! Current Web browsers used in 'surfing the internet' are mere passive windows, depriving the user of the possibility to contribute. During some sessions in the CERN cafeteria, Tim and I try to find a catching name for the system. I was determined that the name should not yet again be taken from Greek mythology..... Tim proposes 'World-Wide Web'. I like this very much, except that it is difficult to pronounce in French... by Robert Cailliau, 2 November 1995.
The first website was built at CERN. Despite this being an international organisation hosted by Switzerland, the office that Berners-Lee used was just across the border in France. The website was put online on 6 August 1991 for the first time:
info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever website and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first webpage address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information. There are no screenshots of this original page and, in any case, changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed. You may find a later copy (1992) on the World Wide Web Consortium website.
It provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, and how people could use a browser and set up a web server, as well as how to get started with your own website. In a list of 80 cultural moments that shaped the world, chosen by a panel of 25 eminent scientists, academics, writers, and world leaders, the invention of the World Wide Web was ranked number one, with the entry stating, "The fastest growing communications medium of all time, the internet has changed the shape of modern life forever. We can connect with each other instantly, all over the world".
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the W3C at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards should be based on royalty-free technology, so that they easily could be adopted by anyone.
In 2001, Berners-Lee became a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust, having previously lived in Colehill in Wimborne, East Dorset. In December 2004, he accepted a chair in computer science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Hampshire, to work on the Semantic Web.
In a Times article in October 2009, Berners-Lee admitted that the initial pair of slashes ("//") in a web address were "unnecessary". He told the newspaper that he easily could have designed web addresses without the slashes. "There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time", he said in his lighthearted apology.
Policy work
In June 2009, then-British prime minister Gordon Brown announced that Berners-Lee would work with the UK government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force. Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures behind data.gov.uk, a UK government project to open up almost all data acquired for official purposes for free re-use. Commenting on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data in April 2010, Berners-Lee said that: "The changes signal a wider cultural change in government based on an assumption that information should be in the public domain unless there is a good reason not to—not the other way around." He went on to say: "Greater openness, accountability and transparency in Government will give people greater choice and make it easier for individuals to get more directly involved in issues that matter to them."
In November 2009, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation in order to "advance the Web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the Web as a medium for positive change."
Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices in favour of net neutrality, and has expressed the view that ISPs should supply "connectivity with no strings attached", and should neither control nor monitor the browsing activities of customers without their expressed consent. He advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network right: "Threats to the internet, such as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on internet traffic, compromise basic human network rights." Berners-Lee participated in an open letter to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He and 20 other Internet pioneers urged the FCC to cancel a vote on 14 December 2017 to uphold net neutrality. The letter was addressed to Senator Roger Wicker, Senator Brian Schatz, Representative Marsha Blackburn and Representative Michael F. Doyle.
Berners-Lee joined the board of advisors of start-up State.com, based in London. As of May 2012, Berners-Lee is president of the Open Data Institute, which he co-founded with Nigel Shadbolt in 2012.
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was launched in October 2013 and Berners-Lee is leading the coalition of public and private organisations that includes Google, Facebook, Intel, and Microsoft. The A4AI seeks to make internet access more affordable so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Berners-Lee will work with those aiming to decrease internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income.
Berners-Lee holds the founders chair in Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he heads the Decentralized Information Group and is leading Solid, a joint project with the Qatar Computing Research Institute that aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy. In October 2016, he joined the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University as a professorial research fellow and as a fellow of Christ Church, one of the Oxford colleges.
On 30 September 2018, Berners-Lee announced a new application made by open-source startup Inrupt based on the Solid standards, which aims to give users more control over their personal data and lets users choose where the data goes, who's allowed to see certain elements and which apps are allowed to see that data.
Awards and honours
List of awards and honours received by Tim Berners-Lee
"He wove the World Wide Web and created a mass medium for the 21st century. The World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free." —Tim Berners-Lee's entry in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century, March 1999.
Berners-Lee has received many awards and honours. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2004 New Year Honours "for services to the global development of the internet", and was invested formally on 16 July 2004.
On 13 June 2007, he was appointed to the Order of Merit (OM), an order restricted to 24 (living) members. Bestowing membership of the Order of Merit is within the personal purview of the Queen, and does not require recommendation by ministers or the Prime Minister. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2001. He has been conferred honorary degrees from a number of Universities around the world, including Manchester (his parents worked on the Manchester Mark 1 in the 1940s), Harvard and Yale.
In 2012, Berners-Lee was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admires to mark his 80th birthday.
In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. On 4 April 2017, he received the 2016 ACM Turing Award "for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale".
Criticism
In 2017 Berners-Lee was criticized by prominent defenders of Internet freedom for approving Encrypted Media Extensions that standardizes Digital Rights Management technology, thus restricting digital freedom. Critics include Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Personal life
Berners-Lee married Nancy Carlson, an American computer programmer, in 1990; she was also working in Switzerland, at the World Health Organization. They had two children and divorced in 2011. In 2014 he married Rosemary Leith at the Chapel Royal, St. James's Palace in London. Leith is a Canadian internet and banking entrepreneur, and a founding director of Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Foundation. The couple also collaborate on venture capital to support artificial intelligence companies.
Berners-Lee was raised as an Anglican, but in his youth, he turned away from religion. After he became a parent, he became a Unitarian Universalist (UU). He has stated: "Like many people, I had a religious upbringing which I rejected as a teenager ... Like many people, I came back to religion when we had children". He and his wife wanted to teach spirituality to their children, and after hearing a Unitarian minister and visiting the UU Church, they opted for it. He is an active member of that church, to which he adheres because he perceives it as a tolerant and liberal belief. He has said: "I believe that much of the philosophy of life associated with many religions is much more sound than the dogma which comes along with it. So I do respect them."
References Further reading Tim Berners-Lee's publications
Tim Berners-Lee and the Development of the World Wide Web (Unlocking the Secrets of Science) (Mitchell Lane Publishers, 2001),
Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web (Ferguson's Career Biographies), Melissa Stewart (Ferguson Publishing Company, 2001), children's biography
How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web, Robert Cailliau, James Gillies, R. Cailliau (Oxford University Press, 2000),
Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Fischetti (Paw Prints, 2008)
"Man Who Invented the World Wide Web Gives it New Definition", Compute Magazine, 11 February 2011
BBC2 Newsnight – Transcript of video interview of Berners-Lee on the read/write Web
Technology Review interview
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/the-man-who-created-the-world-wide-web-has-some-regrets "I Was Devastated": Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets Vanity Fair
External links
Tim Berners-Lee on the W3C site
First World Wide Web page
Interview with Tim Berners Lee
Tim Berners-Lee: "The next Web of open, linked data" – presented his Semantic Web ideas about Linked Data (2009), Ted Talks.
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ALPHABETICAL LISTING
YEAR OF THE AWARD
RESEARCH SUBJECT Birth
: 8 June, 1955.
Education
: Bachelor’s degree in Physics (Queen’s College, Oxford, 1976).
Experience
: Principal Engineer (Plessy, 1976-78), Programmer (D.G. Nash, 1978-80), Contractor (CERN, 1980), Technical manager (Image Computer Systems, 1981-1984), Technical staff (CERN, 1986-1994), Professor (MIT, 1994-Present). 3Com Founders Chair since 1999). Director & Founder of: The World Wide Web Consortium (1994-present) and World Wide Web Foundation (2008-present). Secondary appointments as Professor at Southampton University (2004-present); Professor at Oxford University in Computer Science (2016-Present).
Honors and Awards (selected)
: ACM Software System Award (1992); Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (1995); Fellow of the Royal Society (2001), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), Royal Society of Arts Albert Medal (2002), Japan Prize (2002), Computer History Museum Fellow (2003); Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE); Order of Merit (2007); Draper Prize (2007); Fellow of the IEEE (2008); UNESCO Niels Bohr Gold Medal (2010), Queen Elizabeth II Prize for Engineering (2013); ACM A.M. Turing Award (2016). 19 honorary doctorates as of 2014.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
United Kingdom – 2016
CITATION
For inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.
Short Annotated Bibliography ACM Turing Award Lecture Video Research Subjects Additional Materials
Tim Berners-Lee grew up in London. Both of his parents (Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee) were mathematicians, who had worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, a pioneering effort to commercialize the early Manchester computer. He inherited their interests, playing with electronics as a boy, but choosing physics for his university studies. After earning a degree from Queen’s College, Oxford in 1976 he worked on programming problems at several companies, before joining the European physics lab CERN in 1984. His initial job was in the data acquisition and control group, working to capture and process experimental data.
Inventing the Web
CERN’s business was particle smashing, not computer science, but its computing needs were formidable and it employed a large technical staff. Its massive internal network was connected to the Internet. In March 1989 Berners-Lee began to circulate a document headed “Information Management: A Proposal,” which proposed an Internet-based hypertext publishing system. This, he argued, would help CERN manage the huge collections of documents, code, and reports produced by its thousands of workers, many of them temporary visitors.
Berners-Lee later said that he had been dreaming of a networked hypertext system since a short spell consulting at CERN in 1980. Ted Nelson, who coined the phrase “hypertext” back in the 1960s, had imagined an online platform to replace conventional publishers. Authors could create links between documents, and readers would follow them from one document to another. By the late-1980s hypertext was flourishing as a research area, but in practice was used only in closed systems, such as the Microsoft Windows help system and the Macintosh Hypercard electronic document platform.
Mike Sendall, Berners-Lee’s manager, wrote “vague but exciting” on his copy of the proposal. In May 1990, he authorized Berners-Lee to spend some time on his idea, justifying this as a test of the widely hyped NeXT workstation. This was a high-end personal computer with a novel Unix-based operating system that optimized the rapid implementation of graphical applications. Berners-Lee spent the first few months working out specifications attempting to interest existing hypertext software companies in his ideas. By October 1990, he had begun to code prototype Web browser and server software, finishing in December. On 6, August, 1991, after tests and further development inside CERN, he used the Internet to announce the new “World Wide Web” and to distribute the new software.
Elements of the Web
The World Wide Web was ambitious in some ways, as its name reflects, but cautious in others. Berners-Lee’s initial support from CERN did not consist of much more than a temporary release from his other duties. So he leveraged existing technologies and standards everywhere in the design of the WWW. He remembers CERN as “chronically short of manpower for the huge challenges it had taken on.” There was no team of staff coders standing by to implement any grand plans he might come up with.
The Web, like most of the Internet during this era, was intimately tied in with the Unix operating system (for which Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson won the 1983 Turing Award). For example, the first Web server (and most since) have run as background processes on Unix-derived operating systems. URLs use Unix conventions to specify file paths within a website. To develop his prototype software, Berners-Lee used the NeXT workstation. More fundamentally, Berners-Lee’s whole approach reflected the distinctive Unix philosophy of building new system capabilities by recombining existing tools.
The Web also followed the Internet philosophy of achieving compatibility through communications protocols rather than standard code, hardware, or operating systems. His specifications for the new system led to three new Internet standards.
Web pages displayed text.
HTML
(Hyper Text Markup Language) specified the way text for a Web page should be tagged, for example as a hyperlink, ordinary paragraph, or level 2 heading. It was an application of the existing SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) markup language definition standard.
HTTP
(Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) specified the interactions through which Web browsers could request and receive HTML pages from Web servers. HTML was, in computer science terms, stateless – users did not log into websites and each request for a Web page or other file was treated separately. This made it a file transfer protocol, which was easy to design and implement because existing Internet standards and software, most importantly TCP/IP (for which Vinton Cerf and Robert E. Kahn won the 2004 Turing award), provided the infrastructure needed to pipe data across the network from one program to another. Berners-Lee later called this use of Internet protocols “politically incorrect” as European officials at the time were supporting a transition to the rival ISO network protocols. A few years later it was the success of the Web that put the final nail in their coffin.
Consider a Web address like
http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/berners-lee_8087960.cfm
. This is a
URL
or Uniform Resource Locator (Berners-Lee originally called this a Universal Resource Identifier). The “
amturing.acm.org
” part identified the computer where the resource was found. This was nothing new – Internet sites had been using this Domain Name System since the mid-1980s. The novelty was the “http://” which told Web browsers, and users, to expect a Web server. Information after the first single “/” identified which page on the host computer was being requested. Berners-Lee also specified URL formats for existing Internet resources, including file servers, gopher servers (an earlier kind of Internet hypertext system), and telnet hosts for terminal connections. In 1994, Berners-Lee wrote that “The fact that it is easy to address an object anywhere in the Internet is essential for the system to scale, and for the information space to be independent of the network and server topology.”
The URL was the simplest of the three inventions, but was crucial to the early spread of the Web because it solved the “chicken and egg” problem facing any new communications system. Why set up a Web page when almost nobody has a Web browser? Why run a Web browser when almost nobody has set up a Web server to visit? The URL system made Web browsers a convenient way to access existing resources, cataloged on Web pages. In 1992, the Whole Internet Catalog and User’s Guide stated that “the World Wide Web hasn’t really been exploited yet… Hypertext is used primarily as a way of organizing resources that already exist.”
The Web Takes Off
CERN found some resources to support the further development of the Web – about 20 person years of work in total, mostly from interns. More importantly, it made it clear that others were free to use the new standards and prototype code to develop new and better software. Robert Cailliau, of the Office Computing Systems group, played an important role as a champion of the project within CERN. In 1991 CERN produced a simple text-based browser that could easily be accessed over the Internet and a Macintosh browser, essential to the initial spread of the Web as NeXT workstations remained very rare.
Over the next few years others implemented faster and more robust browsers with new features such as graphics in pages, browser history, and forward and back buttons. Mosaic, released in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications of the University of Illinois, brought the Web to millions of users. In April, 1994 CERN, which was still trying to maintain a comprehensive list of Web servers, cataloged 829 in its “Geographical Registry.”
Berners-Lee later attributed his success largely to “being in the right place at the right time.” He succeeded where larger and better funded teams had failed, setting the foundation for a global hypertext system that quickly became a universal infrastructure for online communication and the foundation for many new industries. Yet the ACM’s 1991 Hypertext conference had rejected Berners-Lee’s paper describing the World Wide Web. From a research viewpoint, the Web seemed to sidestep many thorny research problems related to capabilities that Ted Nelson thought essential for a public hypertext publication system. If a Web page was moved, then links pointing to it stopped working. If the target page was changed, then it might no longer hold the content the link promised. Links went only one way – one couldn’t see which other pages linked to a document. There was no central, searchable index of websites and their content. Neither did the Web itself provide any way for publishers to get paid when people read their work.
Berners-Lee had only a few months at his disposal, which may have been a hidden blessing: Nelson worked for decades without coming close to finishing his system. Rather than attack intractable problems, Berners-Lee used proven technologies as the building blocks of a system intended to be powerful and immediately useful rather than perfect.
The Web’s reliance on existing technologies was appealing to early users and eased deployment – setting up a Web server on a computer already connected to the Internet just involved downloading and installing a small program. This technological minimalism made the Web easy to scale, with no indexing system or central database to overload. After the Web took off, whole new industries emerged to fill in some of the missing capabilities needed for large scale and commercial use, eventually leading, for example, to the rise of Google as the dominant provider of Internet search.
One crucial feature that Berners-Lee built into his prototype Web software was left out of its successors. His browser allowed users to edit pages, and save the changes back on the server. His 1994 article in
Communications of the ACM
noted that “The Web does not yet meet its design goal of being a pool of knowledge that is as easy to update as to read.” Editing capabilities were eventually added in other ways – first through separate HTML editing software, and later with the widespread adoption of content management systems where the software used to edit Web pages is itself accessed through a Web browser.
A screenshot of Berners-Lee’s Web browser software running on his NeXT computer. Note the Edit menu to allow changes, and the Style menu which put decisions over fonts and other display details in the hands of the reader rather than Webpage creators. Since 2014 this computer has been exhibited at the Science Museum in London
.
Berners-Lee feels that his original design decisions have held up well, with one exception: the “//” in URLs which make addresses longer and harder to type without adding any additional information. “I have to say that now I regret that the syntax is so clumsy” he wrote in 2009.
[1] Standardizing the Web
Mosaic’s successor, the commercial browser Netscape, was used by hundreds of millions and kickstarted the “.com” frenzy for new Internet stocks. By 2000 there were an estimated 17 million websites online, used for commercial transactions such as online shopping and banking as well as document display. In the process, HTML was quickly given many clunky and incompatible extensions so that Web pages could be coded for things like font styles and page layout rather than its original focus on document structure.
In 1994 Berners-Lee left CERN for a faculty job at MIT. This let him establish the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to standardize HTML and other, newer, elements of the Web. Berners-Lee had been frustrated in 1992 in an initial attempt to work with the Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that developed and standardized other Internet protocols. The consortium followed a different model, using corporate memberships to support the work of paid staff members. With its guidance the Web has remained open during its growth, so that users can choose their preferred Web browser while still accessing the full range of functionality found on modern websites. It also played a crucial role in adoption of the XML data description language. As of 2017, his primary appointment remains at MIT where he holds the Founders Chair in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and continues to direct W3C.
The Semantic Web
Since the late 1990s Berners-Lee’s primary focus has been on trying to get Web publishers and technology companies to add a set of capabilities he called the “Semantic Web.” Berners-Lee defined his idea as follows: “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."
Document metadata was largely left off the original Web, in contrast to traditional online publishing systems, which made it hard for search engines to determine basic information such as the date on which an article was written or the person who wrote it. The Semantic Web initiative covered a hierarchy of technologies and standards that would let the creators of Web pages tag them to make their conceptual structure explicit, not just for information retrieval but also for machine reasoning.
Legacy and Recognition
The success of the Web drove a massive expansion in Internet access and infrastructure – indeed most Internet users of the late-1990s experienced the Internet primarily through the Web and did not clearly separate the two. Berners-Lee has been widely honored for this work, winning a remarkable array of international prizes. Sir Tim, as he been known since the Queen knighted him in 2004, has been recognized as one of the public faces of British science and technology. In 2012 he appeared with a NeXT computer during the elaborate opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games.
He has been increasingly willing to use this public influence to impact the ways in which governments and companies are shaping the Web. In 2009 he set up the World Wide Web Foundation, which lobbies for “digital equality” and produces rankings of Web freedom around the world. More recently, Berners-Lee has championed protection for personal data, criticized the increasing dominance of proprietary social media platforms, and bemoaned the prevalence of fake news online.
Author: Thomas Haigh [1] https://www.w3.org/People/ Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#etc ABOUT THE A.M. TURING AWARD NOMINATIONS VIDEO: THE ORIGINS OF THE AWARD 2021 LAUREATE: JACK DONGARRA
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