Tim Berners-Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide

At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the Web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He leads the World Wide Web Consortium, overseeing the Web's standards and development.

In the 1980s, scientists at CERN were asking themselves how massive, complex, collaborative projects -- like the fledgling LHC -- could be orchestrated and tracked. Tim Berners-Lee, then a contractor, answered by inventing the World Wide Web. This global system of hypertext documents, linked through the Internet, brought about a massive cultural shift ushered in by the new tech and content it made possible: AOL, eBay, Wikipedia, TED.com...

Berners-Lee is now director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which maintains standards for the Web and continues to refine its design. Recently he has envisioned a "Semantic Web" -- an evolved version of the same system that recognizes the meaning of the information it carries. He is also a senior researcher at MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab.

 

Comments

[lastpost]

12:18 PM on 03/09/2010

“interesting results when the data gets linked up.”

Even more interesting results will manifest. When data is manipulated by an almost infinite number of unique individual minds, acting in concert.

[ThatsTheTheWayItIs]

09:10 AM on 03/09/2010

A little presumptuous, that he "invented the World Wide Web". The Internet already existed, and so did HTML. People already used email, use "talk" programs, and visited sites from which they could download lots of things, from technical data to porn, images and video (early MPEG). People downloaded files using FTP, an old program from Unix, then they used/viewed them on their machine.

Tim wrote Mosaic, a program that combined FTP and viewing the file in one step. If the file was HTML (formatted text), it decoded and displayed it. He didn't have to write FTP or the HTML decoder, they already existed. I made some mods to the first version of Mosaic while at HP. It was fairly amateurish code, but it was just a demo, a "proof of concept".

Mosaic enabled browsing sites, but it didn't help you find sites, for example porn sites. You had to find a list somewhere, lists of sites were everywhere.

The WWW was not too useful until the first search came along. You could consider that as much the start of the WWW, as was Mosaic. Rather incredible what it has led too though.

[arizonaslim]

04:44 PM on 03/09/2010

Tim didn't write Mosaic while he was at CERN in Switzerland. IIRC, he called his browser Enquire.

Marc Andressen, among others, wrote Mosaic at the University of Illinois.

[LatteLiberals]

06:06 AM on 03/09/2010

What kind of government data does this guy want released to the public? Does he want to make it really easy for identify theft?

[ArtShamsky]

12:51 AM on 03/09/2010

C'mon, propeller heads of the world unite. All data accessible at all times and the means to work it. Yeah.

[Libertarian09]

11:45 PM on 03/08/2010

Secrets = Power... Openness = Weakness

I love the concept here but I just can't see how it come to pass. If anything, I expect secrecy and hoarding of information increasing. I hope I am wrong