Tim Berners-Lee Keynotes WWW8

WWW8 Toronto
1999 May 12

"We've been at this for 10 years. And its pretty amazing! But we've just started. It is like the space shuttle has just lifted off. There is still a great way to go!" In the opening keynote of the WWW8 Conference, Tim Berners-Lee reviewed his original dream, discussed unfinished business and the obstacles we will face in our next 10 years.

The Dream; Phase I

Human communication through shared knowledge, access for all, power to create hypertext and interact with one another are all part of Berners-Lee's dream of the Web. In addition, he believed we should learn to exploit computing power in real life and create machine understandable data. We need computers to help us with our real lives.

Berners-Lee outlined the events of what he believes to be the first decade of the Web:

And what is the Web. Berners-Lee believes the Web is UNIVERSAL SPACE. It should be a place where anything can refer to anything. The Web provides human communication through shared knowledge. According to Berners-Lee independence is the challenge. We must work to maintain indepencence not only in hardware/software but in the human interface, language and culture, documents and data, and subjective notions of "quality".

What's Next?

According to Berners-Lee, the goal for 10 years is for the Web to become "Intercreative Space." The Web should allow one to be creative with others. As you read today, so can you should be able to write in the future. If you notice a connection, make a link and collaborate with others. Our new W3C standards provide a foundation. But we need a new generation of products and infrastructure to support this goal. Moving forward has challenges in a number of areas:

Machinery of the Web:

• Well-defined data documents as basis for transactions
• Searches that make sense at last
• Common model for mixing and joining predictable systems (rights, endorsements, configurations, personal profiles privacy policies, library classifications.
• CHALLENGE: is to have a clean data model

Expressive Power is Critical

• Links of meaning form a web
• Can't describe the world in limited languages
• Languages on top of schemas must be expressive
• Heuristics run on top of semantic Web
• CHALLENGE: Fear of expressive power

We're getting there; Universal Web

• XML namespaces
• RDF model & syntax RDF schemas
• XML schema data models approach RDF quest for convergence
• "verge of a metadata revolution"
• Don't say schemas if you are being cool==say schemata
• Combined W3C/IETF joint work on Signed XML and RDF started; this will be a basic part of any Web engine. (digital signature to imply quality/trust)
• CHALLENGE: The number of communitites which have to understand each other

Additional CHALLENGES:

• Weave ourselves into the Web
• Use the Web to create new social machines/structures
• Use the Web to raise ethical levels

Berners-Lee concluded by revisiting the idea of Hypertext. "Hypertext," according to him, "is an old idea, dating back to 1945. But then there were not computers, networks, the Internet. When the Internet was invented, hypertext had been shelved as unworkable. I happened to be at just the right spot in history, I married the new Internet with the old idea of hypertext. The implementation time was just right!"