And for my next trick...

Tim Berners-Lee is the architect of cyberspace. The 55-year-old Englishman invented the technical framework for the web – the network that is used by millions to build today’s rich online world of information, entertainment and commerce.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt says that if computing was a traditional science, “Berners-Lee would win a Nobel Prize. What he’s done is that significant.”

His Oxford degree is in physics, but Berners-Lee is an engineer by instinct. After Oxford he had a number of jobs as a software designer, but he did his breakthrough work during a stint at CERN, the European high-energy physics laboratory outside Geneva. Berners-Lee was a technical consultant, and he wrote a program for storing personal information, called ‘Enquire.’ He then tweaked the program so that physicists could store and link documents on computer networks. That work was the basis for the world wide web, whose underlying software he wrote in 1990.

Today, Berners-Lee wants to take his creation an evolutionary step further – to make the web smarter. He calls the concept the ‘semantic web’, and he is pursuing that goal from a position of considerable influence: he’s the director of the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – the group that oversees the adoption of new technical standards for internet.

So what’s different about the semantic web? To date, the internet has mainly been a tool for displaying and linking information. Computers don’t ‘understand’ the data. The semantic web uses a language that enables ‘intelligent’ web applications to collect, analyse and combine data from many different sources and then present the rich search results to the user. “It’s really all about getting data out there and in ways that can be processed by computers to help people do and understand more,” says Berners-Lee.

E-business as usual?

The implications the semantic web has for the way in which we will do e-business in the future are enormous. In a recent online interview Berners-Lee offered the example of an e-business retailer selling computer printers. “It can sometimes be an afternoon’s work to try and figure out which ink cartridge is actually compatible with which printer. Suppose the retailer publishes that information in RDF [semantic web format], then you could just look up the printer and find all the compatible ink cartridges. Someone could then write a program that automatically buys all the ink cartridges at the appropriate prices. The company will find that its users are happier, and they’ll end up selling more printers and more cartridges. The whole world will run more smoothly and we’ll all have more time to get on with more important questions.” Early moves towards machine-to-machine processing are already evident. The longer-term goal is to fashion clever software programs, called agents, that can do things like act as a digital butler to make doctor and dentist appointments or handle shopping online, according to your preferences.

Indeed, the real promise of a more powerful web is as a new platform for such e-business innovations. That has been the lesson of the web so far. Berners-Lee created a tool, and other creative minds came up with the ideas behind Google and the thousands of other e-business companies.

One interesting development is what Berners-Lee describes as “top-down, grass-roots” initiatives, where non-personal government data is released for public use (see right). “If it’s interesting data, there are people out there who will convert it into semantic web standards and do useful things with it,” he says. He points to what happened when the previous Government released data on the location of biking accidents. In a couple of days, the data had been put in a format for mapping and published on a web page showing accident clusters. “You could instantly see, based on where the accidents had been, if you should be biking somewhere else,” Berners-Lee says. “In less than 48 hours, you had a direct social benefit.”

The sources of personal digital data that can be analysed are also growing, creating obvious commercial opportunities. As a result, says Berners-Lee, the ground rules for privacy must be re-examined. “If you’re a prospective employer you should not be able to use my GPS trail to check how long I have been in which bars,” he says. “I do think we are turning traditional notions of privacy upside down. We are not going to be giving our personal data all or locking it up. I think we’ll move to setting up rules of accountability for appropriate use.”

Tim Berners-Lee is also lending his semantic web expertise to the Government. He’s helping them with a website that offers free access to public sector data to help create innovative and useful apps.

The site, data.gov.uk, offers reams of data, from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use. The aim is to encourage British web developers and companies to create websites that combine the data with other information, such as time, maps or other data sets to potentially discover hidden patterns that may not be obvious from the raw information.

“It’s such an untapped resource,” says Berners-Lee. “Government data is something we have already spent the money on... and when it is sitting there on a disk in somebody’s office, it is wasted.”

When the developer preview phase began in autumn last year, more than 2,400 developers registered to test the site and provide feedback. Developers have already built a site that shows the location of schools according to their Ofsted rating. Another site, Fill That Hole, allows people to report potholes and other road hazards, using location data from the Office for National Statistics.

The site also shows the possible uses of the data, such as Planning Alerts, a free service that combs local authority planning websites looking for planning applications. It then automatically emails details of applications in the local area to anyone who has signed up for the service.

The US government has a similar site, data.gov, set up by the Obama administration, and London mayor Boris Johnson’s office launched its own London ‘datastore’, with a raft of London-specific data sets collated from government departments and Transport for London.