Tuesday, May 23, 2006 | MANILA, PHILIPPINES

News

Web inventor sees his brainchild ready for big leap

AMSTERDAM -- The World Wide Web is on the cusp of making its next big leap to become an open environment for collaboration and its inventor said he has not been so optimistic in years.

Still, Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who invented and then gave away the World Wide Web, warns that Internet crime and anti-competitive behavior need to be fought tooth and nail.

A lot of new technology to make the Web smarter and easier to use is becoming available after many years, he said.

"My personal view is that a lot of it is coming together now. That is very gratifying to see. We're moving into another mode with established technology. I'm very optimistic at this moment," Mr. Berners-Lee said in a telephone interview ahead of the annual World Wide Web conference, which was to open in Edinburgh, Scotland yesterday.

"The whole industrial environment is more exciting. We had the bubble and the burst, but now you see a low of young companies again. There's renewed enthusiasm among VCs (venture capitalists) to invest in start-ups. I get a feeling of upsurge in activity."

Roughly twice as much money is being invested in European Internet start-ups compared with two years ago, according to venture capitalist community Tornado-Insider.

The man who in 1990 designed the key ingredients of the Web, while at the European Particle Physics Laboratory CERN in Geneva, is more upbeat than a few years ago.

"Four years ago, the patent problems were getting in the way. A lot of us were worried, because it looked like the whole thing could get bogged down," he said, referring to attempts by private companies to patent key software ingredients needed on Web sites and charge royalties for usage.

Thanks to the help of many, royalty-free licenses are now available, said the man who never saw a cent of royalties for his invention which set off an industry that is now generating hundreds of billions of euros (dollars) a year.

Currently the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which is a US-headquartered forum of companies and organizations to improve the Web, Mr. Berners-Lee is only now realizing his early vision of a two-way Web where people can easily work together on the same page and where the content on a page can be recognized by computers.

Google Maps, whose geographic maps turn up on other sites combined with services, and photo sharing site Flickr, where members comment on each other's postings and developers can use the pictures to create new applications, are early examples of how Web sites can combine data from different sources.

"Several years ago we said: 'What a shame that we can't go to that Web site and find all that stuff in there.' We had a loose road map five years ago. Steadily we've been making progress," said Mr. Berners-Lee, adding that most of the work had been done.

"Of course there are people who say: 'Why didn't Tim do that from the start?' But it's more complicated," he said.

Elements are already filtering through, such as Web sites that do not have to be refreshed entirely when only parts are being updated.

A new query language, SPARQL (pronounced "Sparkle"), is designed to make Web pages easier for machines to read, allowing all sorts of different data to be put to work on the Web.

"SPARQL will make a huge difference," Mr. Berners-Lee said.

Other targets on his list are to expand the Web to mobile devices and to access it with mouth and ear.

"You can see so many ways the Web is taking off in so many different directions," Mr. Berners-Lee said.

He is no fan, however, of fenced-off Web areas specially designed for mobile devices such as the new ".mobi" suffix. He wants Web sites and devices to be smart enough to figure out what the best way is to present information to consumers.

He is also concerned about how some Internet providers in the US have started to filter data, giving priority to premium data for which the operator receives an additional fee. They can do this, because they own the cables, the service, the portals and other key applications.

"The public will demand an open Internet," he said.

On his blog, Mr. Berners-Lee pays homage to the democratic principles of the designers of the Internet who decided that all data packets were created equal.

"I tried then to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform," he said. "It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing." -- Reuters

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