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Timothy Berners-Lee might be giving Bill Gates a run for the money, but he passed up his shot at fabulous wealth—intentionally—in 1990. That’s when he decided not to patent the technology used to create the most important software innovation in the final decade of the 20th century, the World Wide web. Berners-Lee wanted to make the world a richer place, not a mass personal wealth. So he gave his brainchild to us all.
Berners-Lee regards today’s Web as a rebellious adolescent that can never fulfill his original expectations. By 2005, he hopes to begin replacing it with the Semantic Web-a smart network that will finally understand human languages and make computers virtually as easy to work with as other humans.
As imagined by Berners-Lee, the new Web would understand not only the meaning of words and concepts but also the logical relationships among them. That has great potential. Most knowledge is built on two pillars: semantics and mathematics. In number-processing, computers already outclass people. Machines that are equally skilled at dealing with language and reason won’t just help people uncover new insights; they could blaze new trails on their own. Even with a fairly crude version of this future Web, mining online for valuable pieces of knowledge would no longer force people to go through screen after screen of irrelevant data. Instead, computers would dispatch intelligent agents, or software messengers, to explore Web sites by the thousands and logically pick out just what’s relevant. That alone would provide a major boost in productivity at work and at home. But there’s far more.
Software agents could also take on many routine business work, such as helping manufacturers find and negotiate with low-cost part suppliers and handling help-desk questions. The Semantic Web would also be a treasure house of eureka insight. Most inventions and scientific breakthroughs, including today’s Web, spring from novel combinations of existing knowledge. The Semantic Web would make it possible to evaluate more combinations overnight than a person could do in a life time. Sure scientists and other people can post ideas on the Web today for others to read. But with machines doing the reading and translating technical terms, related ideas from millions of Web pages could be distilled and summarized. That will lift the ability to assess and integrate information to new heights. The Semantic Web, Berners-Lee predicts, will help more people become more intuitive as well as more analytical. It will foster global collaborations among people with diverse cultural perspectives, so we have a better chance of finding the right solutions to the really big issues-like the environment and climate warning.