The Next web

Whatever else 1955 is remembered for, it boasts two notable birthdays. That June, Timothy J. Berners-Lee popped into the world in London, and a few months later, William H. Gates III opened his eyes in Seattle. Gates went on to become the richest person on earth as head of Microsoft Corp. Tim Berners-Lee might be giving Gates a run for the money, but he passed up his shot at fabulous wealth-intentionally – in 1990. That's when he decided not to patent the technology used to create the most important software innovation in the final decade of the 20th century: the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee wanted to make the world a richer place, not amass personal wealth. So he gave his brainchild to us all.

Now, the idealistic father of the Web plans an even grander gift: a next-generation Web that almost certainly will rank as the most important software of this decade. Berners-Lee regards to-day's Web as a rebellious adolescent that can never fulfill his original expectations. By 2005, he hopes to begin replacing it with the Semantic Web – a smart network that will finally understand human languages and make computers virtually as easy to work with as other humans.

This new project is a collaborative effort of hundreds of minds, with Berners-Lee as maestro. The ultimate goal: to turn the Web into a gigantic brain. Every computer connected to the Internet would have access to all the knowledge that humankind has accumulated in science, business, and the arts since we began painting the walls of caves 30,000 years ago. This racial memory would be a constant source of inspiration for dreaming sublime dreams, boosting human creativity, and solving previously intractable problems. Online commerce chores and Web services would be handled by software modules that snap together like toy Lego blocks. "We expect the Semantic Web to be as big a revolution as the original Web itself," says Richard Hayes-Roth, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s chief technology officer for software.

To get there, though, Berners-Lee must navigate some very muddy waters. Development of the Semantic Web is being funded mainly by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which he heads. Founded in 1994 and based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the W3C is the guardian of Web technology and standards. Its budget relies heavily on membership dues from more than 400 companies. And while making money may not be a primary motivator for Berners-Lee, it's what business is all about. Conflicts, in short, were inevitable – and not just centering around Berners-Lee. Indeed, mediating the inevitable clashes among W3C's hundreds of companies, each with its own agenda, will be the acid test of Berners-Lee's leadership.

A particularly thorny issue cropped up last August. A W3C committee of 13 members, including IBM and Microsoft, proposed installing tollbooths on the Information. Highway by allowing patented software to be included in W3C-approved standards. The committee reasoned that as online offerings grow more sophisticated, the developers of software for handling advanced Web services, such as supply-chain management and collaborative engineering, should be permitted to collect royalties on their investments. But Berners-Lee is philosophically opposed to standards that would impose fees, and many other W3C members, such as the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, also denounced the notion. "Things have calmed down a bit," says Robert S. Sutor, IBM'S director of e-business standards, and the committee is now rethinking its stance. Berners-Lee says the mood has now shifted "strongly toward a royalty-free position."

Meanwhile, the W3C is taking heat on other fronts. Critics say the organization is moving too slowly on developing standards to ensure that different Web-service offerings can work together. Business sees major revenue growth from better tools that can deal with complicated travel arrangements, say, or deliver new entertainment options. But companies are reluctant to invest in developing such software until big corporations are on the same page. What good would it do, for example, to create a program under Microsoft's Web-services initiative, dubbed .Net, if it couldn't link up with a related program written in Java for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s counterpart? Or if a computer-aided design program at Boeing Corp. were unable to talk to the company's engineering or manufacturing software?

A W3C draft specification aimed at harmonizing Web services vices was published in January, 2001, "but the W3C then sat on its hands for a whole year" complains Uttam M. Narsu, an analyst at Giga Information Group. Not until late January did the W3C organize several working groups to tackle standards for Web services. "My sense is that [W3C staffers] are too visionary," Narsu says. "They're devoting too much effort to the Semantic Web, believing it will change the world yet again, and not enough effort to less sexy things that are important to business in the near term."

The Semantic Web is certainly sexy. "As envisioned by Berners-Lee, it would understand not only the meaning of words and concepts but also the logical relationships among them. That has awesome potential. Most knowledge is built on two pillars: semantics and mathematics. In number-crunching, computers already outclass people. Machines that are equally adroit at dealing with language and reason won't just help people uncover new insights; they could blaze new trails on their own.

Even with a fairly crude version of this future Web, mining online repositories for nuggets of knowledge would no longer force people to wade through screen after screen of extraneous data. Instead, computers would dispatch intelligent agents, or software messengers, to explore Web sites by the thousands and logically sift out just what's relevant. That alone would provide a major boost in productivity at work and at home. But there's far more.

Software agents could also take on many routine business chores, such as helping manufacturers find and negotiate with lowest-cost parts suppliers and handling help-desk questions. The Semantic Web would also be a bottomless trove of eureka insights. Most inventions and scientific breakthroughs, including today's Web, spring from novel combinations of existing knowledge. The Semantic Web would make it possible to evaluate more combinations overnight than a person could juggle in a lifetime. "A lot of scientific research is now interdisciplinary, like global climate change, and the scientists need to talk to each other," says Chaitanya Baru, a data-mining expert at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. "But they use different jargon."

Sure, scientists and other people can post ideas on the Web today for others to read. But with machines doing the reading and translating jargon terms, related ideas from millions of Web pages could be distilled and summarized. That will lift the ability to assess and integrate information to new heights.

As a result, Berners-Lee envisions a new age of enlightenment. The Semantic Web, he predicts, "will help more people become more intuitive as well as more analytical. It will foster global collaborations among people with diverse cultural perspectives, so we have a better chance of finding the right solutions to the really big issues – like the environment and climate warming." In short, it will change the world even more than his original creation.

The capital-Q question is: Can he pull it off? There's no shortage of doubters. Still, most people who know the reclusive Berners-Lee are optimistic. "Tim has a gift for seeing the future and making it happen," says John It. Patrick, a retired IBM senior exec who helped found the W3C. Eric E. Schmidt, formerly of Sun and now chairman of search-engine innovator Google Inc., says Berners-Lee would be a shoo-in for a Nobel prize - if Nobel were given in computer science. And Larry L. Smarr, director of the California Institute of Telecommunications & Information Technology at the University of California at San Diego, predicts the Semantic Web will cast Berners-Lee as "an historic-level figure."

What impresses those elder statesmen of computing is Berners-Lee's leadership track record. For a somewhat shy software nerd, he has demonstrated a surprising flair for diplomacy, combined with bulldog tenacity. In the midst of the dot-com bust two years ago, Berners-Lee persuaded the W3C's hard-nosed denizens of commerce to begin developing the Semantic Web. And before that, in 1998, he persuaded them to approve extensible markup language (XML), an important new Web lingo. "Tim did a great job shepherding XML through the W3C," notes Smarr.

Indeed, the evolution of XML may be a useful foretaste of what's in store for the Berners-Lee's new vision. In the late 1990s, this language was constructed to help computers identify different types of data on the Web. "When we started work on XML, it was considered pretty esoteric," recalls Sutor of IBM. "But now it's the underpinnings of everything we're doing in e-business." Ditto to for hundreds of others, including the 300 companies already ready using XML software from Open Applications Group Inc. OAGI predicts that number will double this year.

Berners-Lee worked tirelessly to win support for XML because it's a quantum leap beyond today's witless hypertext markup language (HTML) – and it's the cornerstone of the Semantic Web. HTML is the language that Berners-Lee concocted while on a fellowship as a database engineer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. But the language merely specifies the appearance of a Web page: what colors go where, which type sizes to use, and where to put graphic elements. To a Web browser, or most other computer programs, these words and numbers are just squiggles of gibberish. Without some kind of clue, computers parsing a Web page can't determine if "buy" is a noun or a verb, or whether "20031" is a Zip Code, a price, or the number of orders placed last month.

In contrast, XML tags imbue the Web with meaning. Examples might be such labels as <patient ID>, <drug name> and <known interaction> for medical records. The "name" tag would have links to relevant sections of online literature, also coded with XML, and "interaction" would point to other drugs that interfere with the medication. Then, when a doctor bats out a prescription on a computer, a software agent could verify that the drug is appropriate for the diagnosis, check the patient's records to see what other medicines the person is taking, and determine whether any of them is likely to interfere with the new prescription. A group of university and industrial researchers is already working on such a scheme with the Veterans Administration and the National Library of Medicine.

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