The Future of the Web

An interesting interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the "creator" of the World Wide Web (WWW), discusses how he sees the world wide web evolving. Berners-Lee gives good examples of some of the more abstract concepts and specifically discusses the difference between the currently hot term web 2.0 and his own future vision of the world wide web, which he calls the semantic web. In a nutshell the semantic web is defined by Berners-Lee:

The Semantic Web is about putting data files on the Web. It's not just a Web of documents but also of data. The Semantic Web of data would have many applications to connect together. For the first time there is a common data format for all applications, for databases and Web pages.

These are some fairly exciting prospects...now someone just needs to figure out how to do it - luckily Berners-Lee mentioned that he is part of a research group at MIT which is developing systems that may be able to achieve these lofty goals.

The article also touches on many other aspects of the Internet such as net neutrality and future Internet governance as well as a quick reflection from Berners-Lee's regarding his time at CERN.