Hearing on the "Digital Future of the United States: Part I -- The Future of the World Wide Web"

11 Feb 13

Case Kennedy

The success of the World Wide Web, itself built on the open Internet, has depended on three critical factors: 1) unlimited links from any part of the Web to any other; 2) open technical standards as the basis for continued growth of innovation applications; and 3) separation of network layers, enabling independent innovation for network transport, routing and information applications. Today these characteristics of the Web are easily overlooked as obvious, self-maintaining, or just unimportant. All who use the Web to publish or access information take it for granted that any Web page on the planet will b

06 Mar 12

Getaneh Alemu

Testimony of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
CSAIL Decentralized Information Group
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Before the
United States House of Representatives
Committee on Energy and Commerce

Semantic Web Tim Berners-Lee Testimony Web WWW World Wide Web future technology berners-lee

31 Dec 11

Danielle McKelvie

Tech Future Internet World Wide Web Tim Timothy Berners-Lee Info Information Technology History

11 Feb 09

Magnus Andersson

Reference Computer history internet

24 Jul 08

Gosia Stergios

future_web semantic_web

01 Jul 08

Maggie Wolfe Riley

Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web

ideas technology web2.0 web

30 Jun 08

Benjamin Jörissen

www webstudies

As the Web passes through its first decade of widespread use, we still know surprisingly little about these complex technical and social mechanisms. We have only scratched the surface of what could be realized with deeper scientific investigation into its design, operation and impact on society. Robust technical design, innovative business decisions, and sound public policy judgment all require that we are aware of the complex interactions between technology and society. We call this awareness Web Science: the science and engineering of this massive system for the common good.[10] In order to galvanize Web Science research and education efforts, MIT and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom have created the Web Science Research Initiative.

27 Jun 08

Heinz Wittenbrink

Tim Berners-Lees Statement in einem Kongress-Hearing zur Zukunft des Webs

by:tbl medientheorie basisliteratur

02 May 08

alimanfoo

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fdig.csail.mit.edu%2F2007%2F03%2F01-ushouse-future-of-the-web.html

Alistair Miles

www semanticweb

The success of the World Wide Web, itself built on the open Internet, has depended on three critical factors: 1) unlimited links from any part of the Web to any other; 2) open technical standards as the basis for continued growth of innovation applications; and 3) separation of network layers, enabling independent innovation for network transport, routing and information applications.
A. Universal linking: Anyone can connect to anyone, any page can link to any page
How did the Web grow from nothing to the scale it is at today? From a technical perspective, the Web is a large collection of Web pages (written in the standard HTML format), linked to other pages (with the linked documents named using the URI standard), and accessed over the Internet (using the HTTP network protocol). In simple terms, the Web has grown because it's easy to write a Web page and easy to link to other pages.
What makes it easy to create links from one page to another is that there is no limit to the number of pages or number of links possible on the Web. Adding a Web page requires no coordination with any central authority, and has an extremely low, often zero, additional cost. What's more, the protocol that allows us to follow these links (HTTP) is a non-discriminatory protocol. It allows us to follow any link at all, regardless of content or ownership. So, because its so easy to write a Web page, link to another page, and follow these links around, people have done a lot of this. Adding a page provides content, but adding a link provide the organization, structure and endorsement to information on the Web which turn the content as a whole into something of great value.
The universality and flexibility of the Web's linking architecture has a unique capacity to break down boundaries of distance, language, and domains of knowledge. These traditional barriers fall away because the cost and complexity of a link is unaffected by most boundaries that divide other media. It's as easy to link from information about commercial law in the United States to commercial law in China, as it is to make the same link from Massachusetts' Commercial Code to that of Michigan. These links work even though they have to traverse boundaries of distance, network operators, computer operating systems, and a host of other technical details that previously served to divide information. The Web's ability to allow people to forge links is why we refer to it as an abstract information space, rather than simply a network.
C. Separation of Layers
The Web, as a new application, rolled out over the existing Internet without any changes to the Internet itself. This is the genius of the design of the Internet, for which I take no credit. Applying the age old wisdom of design with interchangeable parts and separation of concerns, each component of the Internet and the applications that run on top of it are able develop and improve independently. This separation of layers allows simultaneous but autonomous innovation to occur at many levels all at once.
First, the Web will get better and better at helping us to manage, integrate, and analyze data. Today, the Web is quite effective at helping us to publish and discover documents, but the individual information elements within those documents (whether it be the date of any event, the price of a item on a catalog page, or a mathematical formula) cannot be handled directly as data. Today you can see the data with your browser, but can't get other computer programs to manipulate or analyze it without going through a lot of manual effort yourself. As this problem is solved, we can expect that Web as a whole to look more like a large database or spreadsheet, rather than just a set of linked documents.
Digital information about nearly every aspect of our lives is being created at an astonishing rate. Locked within all of this data is the key to knowledge about how to cure diseases, create business value, and govern our world more effectively. The good news is that a number of technical innovations (RDF which is to data what HTML is to documents, and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) which allows us to express how data sources connect together) along with more openness in information sharing practices are moving the World Wide Web toward what we call the Semantic Web.
Progress toward better data integration will happen through use of the key piece of technology that made the World Wide Web so successful: the link. The power of the Web today, including the ability to find the pages we're looking for, derives from the fact that documents are put on the Web in standard form, and then linked together. The Semantic Web will enable better data integration by allowing everyone who puts individual items of data on the Web to link them with other pieces of data using standard formats.
To appreciate the need for better data integration, compare the enormous volume of experimental data produced in commercial and academic drug discovery laboratories around the world, as against the stagnant pace of drug discovery. While market and regulatory factors play a role here, life science researchers are coming to the conclusion that in many cases no single lab, no single library, no single genomic data repository contains the information necessary to discover new drugs. Rather, the information necessary to understand the complex interactions between diseases, biological processes in the human body, and the vast array of chemical agents is spread out across the world in a myriad of databases, spreadsheets, and documents.
The unique value creation is in the integration services, not in the raw data itself or even in the software tools, most of which will be built on open source components.

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08 Feb 08

Adam Bohannon

berners-lee future web

Though I was privileged to lead the effort that gave rise to the Web in the mid-1990s, it has long passed the point of being something designed by a single person or even a single organization. It has become a public resource upon which many individuals, communities, companies and governments depend. And, from its beginning, it is a medium that has been created and sustained by the cooperative efforts of people all over the world.
The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails.... The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation.