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Recently, several GlobalSpec engineers attended a forum at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute (RPI) called "Washington, Wikipedia, and Web
3:0: What is the Future of the Web?" Held at the RPI Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary
Studies Auditorium, the forum featured poster-board conversations with RPI
researchers, a keynote presentation (including an HTML slide-show) by Tim
Berners-Lee, and then a panel discussion. RPI President Shirley Jackson
introduced the event.
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the World
Wide Web (WWW). The inventor of the first Web browser discussed a variety of topics,
ranging from what he calls "the cycle of Web science" to his own motivations
for moving to the U.S. (to MIT from the U.K.) in the early 1990s. In case
you're wondering, Berners-Lee's move was based partly on the widespread use of
the Internet in the U.S.
compared to other countries at the time. Oh, and in case you're wondering about
search engine optimization (SEO) and your own Web site, research indicates that
there's no "typical" number of links that point to Web sites.
Tim Berners-Lee spent a great deal of time discussing the "semantic
Web", an evolving extension of the World Wide Web. With the semantic Web, the
meaning of information and services on the Web is defined, making it possible for the Web to better
understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines. He also explored
the scale-free semantic Web and what he calls "philosophical engineering". In
reviewing Web usage (weekday vs. weekend) since 1991, Berners-Lee contrasted
the past with the present and discussed the "Power Law" growth that has
occurred. He also noted a major "lesson-learned" since 1991 - that bringing
education to the Web was not what was anticipated.
In addition, the W3C Director discussed "provenance", a term
adapted for computer science, which Merriam-Webster.com defines as "the history
of ownership of a valued object or work of art or literature". Next,
Berners-Lee examined new Internet modeling that combines psychology and
economics in thought-processes which result in click-through decisions. He also
defined several acronyms: research description framework (RDF), a programming
language; and URI (uniform resource identifiers), which Wikipedia.org states
may be classified as universal resource locators (URLs), uniform resource names
(URNs), or both.
Next, Tim Berners-Lee discussed self-forming social systems,
which are exemplified by Wikipedia with its self-policing structures. He also
defined "ontology", a term derived from philosophy and applied to computer
science. Ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain
and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the
properties of that domain, and may be used to define the domain. Finally,
Berners-Lee examined the possibility of having an open-source semantic
Web delivery system bring long-tail high definition (HD) movies to users – a
move that is likely to meet resistance from local cable companies. Finally, he
talked about the mapping of global languages to a database of
language-independent ideas.
Editor's Note: Click here for Part 2. Click here to watch the video of the forum.
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