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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
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"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
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<title>Book outline</title>
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<body bgcolor="#f8fed3" text="black" link="blue" vlink="green" style="color:
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#000000;background-color: #FFF8ED" lang="en">
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<p></p>
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<p>Transcript of <a
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href="http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Overview.html#Talks">Tim
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Berners-Lee</a>'s talk to the LCS 35th Anniversary celebrations, Cambridge
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Massachusetts, 1999/April/14. See also:</p>
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<ul>
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<li>
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<a href="../../Talks/1999/0414-LCS35-tbl/slide1-1.html">Slides</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.lcs.mit.edu/">MIT Laboratory for Computer Science</a>
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</li>
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<li>
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<a href="http://www.lcs.mit.edu/anniv/agenda/">MIT LCS 35th Anniversary
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</a>(April 1999)
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</li>
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</ul>
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<p>[edited for comprehensibility]</p>
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<p></p>
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<p>TIM BERNERS-LEE: It's a great pleasure to be addressing you on this 35th
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anniversary. Of course, it's a 35th anniversary of LCS, and it's also the
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35th anniversary of the Web, if you count in Web years. [Laughter.]</p>
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<p>I will say a little bit about where I'm coming from, what the original idea
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was, because I don't want to talk about the future as a prediction. I don't
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give predictions. That I leave to Bob. It's dangerous: you end up eating your
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articles, and so I will stick to talking about what I would like to see
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partly because when there are a bunch of people from LCS in the audience, the
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next thing you find is somebody has come around to your office, knocked on
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the door, and said that, by the way, they've done it.</p>
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<p>When I'm talking about what I would like to see, you know, it hasn't
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changed very much in ten years. So if I talk about where I'm coming from, what
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I wanted to see then, then, that's two-thirds of my hopes for the future.
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I'll give a little bit of history of how where the World Wide Web Consortium
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came to LCS, and then I'll talk a bit about the Web and about an interesting
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distinction between what we used to call documents, and what we used to call
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data.</p>
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<p>The basic ideas of the Web is that an information space through which
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people can communicate, but communicate in a special way: communicate by
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sharing their knowledge in a pool. The idea was not just that it should be a
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big browsing medium. The idea was that everybody would be putting their ideas
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in, as well as taking them out. This is not supposed to be a glorified
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television channel Also everybody should be excited about the power to
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actually create hypertext. Writing hypertext is good fun, and being with a
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group of people writing hypertext and trying to work something out, by making
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links is a different way of working. I hoped that it would be a way that
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soon, for example, the European Particle Physics Laboratory at Geneva,
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Switzerland, where I was at the time. I'd hoped it would be a way for us to
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much more efficiently use people who came and went, use student work, use
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people working remotely. And leave a trail, not a paper trail, but a trail in
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hyperspace.</p>
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<p>So I had hoped that the Web would be a tool for us, understanding each
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other and working together efficiently on larger scales. Getting over the
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problem which befalls the organization that was so fun when it was a start-up
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of six people (many of you will know about this phenomenon). When you get to
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60 people it is still great fun, and you're still rollerblading in the parking
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lot. And then when you get to 61 people, you worry that you don't know that
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person's name, and the difficulties of scaling the organization set in.</p>
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<p>There's a second half to the dream really, and I must admit that originally
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I was a little bit careful about expressing this. But the second half is the
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hope that when we've got all of our organization communicating together
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through this medium which is accessible to machines, to computer programs,
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that there will be some cool computer programs which we could write to analyze
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that stuff: to figure out how the organization really runs; and what is its
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real structure, never mind the structure we have given it; and all kinds of
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things like that. And to do that, of course, the information on the Web would
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have to be understandable to some extent by a machine and at the moment it's
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not.</p>
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<p>Here is a very basic history overview. I originally wrote a proposal.
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That's the piece of paper which I dropped into the time capsule, for those of
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you who were at the party. I wrote the proposal in 1989 and tried to explain
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that I thought the global hypertext would be a great idea. Now, the world is
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full of people writing these proposals and since Vennevor Bush started in
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1945 and it was published in the Atlantic Monthly and still nobody developed
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a global hypertext system. And then Doug Enbgelbart actually showed people
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how to do it two decades later, and still it didn't happen because he just
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didn't happen to be in the right place at the right time. But I was.</p>
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<p>I was in right place in that the European particle physics community was
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full of people with machines on their desk — now just about starting
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to be Internet worked: connected to the Internet as opposed to all sorts of
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proprietary networks. And I was at a place where my boss Mike Sandel and his
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boss David Williams, who is sitting down here, were prepared to not say no.
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They let me go ahead and do it, "even though we can't actually justify it."
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That happened actually in 1990 when I bought one of those new NeXT machines,
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which was a great programming environment in lots of ways. I could actually
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put together a hypertext editor, (browser/editor; it was the same
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thing—It was modeless) pretty quickly. And then in the summer of '91 we
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actually released the code, put it up on an FTP server and drew people's
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attention to the first Web site and the first Web client and started to try
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to push this. It was still very difficult, you know, to explain how exciting
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global hypertext is if you only have a couple of Web pages. That may seem
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silly now and obvious, but it's very difficult to show the excitement in one
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Web page.</p>
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<p>The excitement of a hypertext link is that it can point to anything out
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there. When there's nothing out there then that is just difficult to
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demonstrate. So for several years it's a question of first trying to justify
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my existence. In fact I wasn't working on anything else, and the other people
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who had got onto the team one way or another. They sort of slipped through,
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working in different places, working across the world collaborating over the
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Internet. And persuading people to put out Web browsers was tricky. It
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involved all kinds of doing sneaky things, suggesting that they needed a Web
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browser for a very specific application so that they would get it and then
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that they would be—they would just increase the number of clients out
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there which would increase the incentive for somebody to put up a server and
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vice-versa. And eventually the thing started snowballing.</p>
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<p>Now, in 1992 it was clear that it was taking off. It still wasn't clear
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that it would, for example ever take over from the Internet Gopher, which was
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another system expanding exponentially on the Internet. But people were
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already starting to come into my office. Alan Kotok from Digital came with
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three colleagues, unannounced. Now, people don't generally drop in Geneva
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unannounced, particularly Americans. We found a conference room quickly and
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he explained that they were starting to investigate what Digital should do,
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how Digital should address this "Internet" and the World Wide Web. "We're
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concerned about stability and we understand that it all hinges on some
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specifications which you have stored on a disk somewhere..". They wondered
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how stable they were and how we get to insure their continued stability and
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their evolution.</p>
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<p>I started talking with them and other people about what sort of a body we
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needed to make sure that the Web would evolve into something we could
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use—now it was becoming a serious thing. They were very adamant, like
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everyone else, that there should be some neutral forum where people could
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meet. I started shopping around. I looked at a number of different
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possibilities: setting it up as a company; joining a large company and
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setting it up base there, setting it up at some other institution. I traveled
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around a bit and talked to a lot of people and there's one place which came up
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with checks in all the boxes. In fact it was on a bus going from a conference
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dinner in Newcastle in northern England on one rainy night to a small hotel
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that I sat next to David Gifford from LCS, who listened to the story politely
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and said I should mail this Michael D
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something—<code>mld@hq.lcs.mit.edu</code>—and he might be
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interested.</p>
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<p>I did and next thing Michael dropped in in Zurich and from then on I
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discovered that not only could I sell him the idea of setting up as a base in
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the U.S. but I could sell him on the idea of setting it up as an
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international thing. He was just as enthusiastic as me about that. So that's
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the story of how the Web Consortium came to LCS. And the rest is more or less
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history and acronyms, and I won't to into the acronyms in case you are
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frightened about them. But basically things have been happening.</p>
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<p>The fundamental thing about the space—about this Web, as I said, is
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that anything can refer to anything. Otherwise it's no fun. You've got to be
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able to make the link to anything. It's no good asking people to put things
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on the Web, saying that anything of importance should have this "URL",if you
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then request anything else. To make such an audacious request you have to
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then release anything else. So that requires that the Web has completely
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minimalist design. We don't impose anything else. It has to be independent of
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anything. The great challenge, really the raison d'etre initially for getting
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the Web protocols out, was to be independent of hardware platform: to be able
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to see the stuff on the mainframe from your PC and to be able to see the
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stuff on the PC from the Mac. To get across those boundaries was at the time
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so huge and strange and unbelievable. And if we don't do things right it will
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be huge and strange and unbelievable again: we could go back down that route
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very easily.</p>
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<p>It was important to get it should be independent of software. The World
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Wide Web originally was a client program called "World Wide Web". I
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eventually renamed the program because I didn't want the World Wide Web to be
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one program. It's very important that any program that can talk the World Wide
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Web protocols—(HTTP, HTML,...) can provide equivalent access to the
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information.</p>
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<p>It's very important to be independent of the way you actually happen to
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access this information. We're using a rather large screen here but it works
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just as well on this small screen. It should also work if you need to have
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these read to you, because maybe you're visually impaired or maybe you're
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driving along. 20 percent of the people who have access to the Web have some
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sort of impairment; maybe they can see the screen fine but they can't use a
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mouse. So it's very important that we separate the content from the way we're
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presenting it. This slide is just an HTML file, but it has a style sheet that
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says it needs to be big and it should be white on blue according to the
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guidelines.</p>
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<p>It's important that the Web should be independent of language and culture,
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and I could now talk for two hours just about that. In the Consortium, just
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as we have a Web accessibility initiative addressed the question of
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accessibility, we have an activity which looks specifically about
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internationalization. But then you have to add culture, then you're talking
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about a whole lot more than just using Unicode and just making sure that you
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can make the letters go up and down the page instead of across the page.</p>
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<p>It's important that the Web should be independent of quality of
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information. I don't want it to be somewhere where you would publish technical
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reports only after you had finished. If you can link to anything I want this
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to be part of the process. So the review of the technical report and the
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scribbling of the original note which led to the idea that became the project
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which resulted in the technical report should all be there and they should all
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be linked together. So it's very important that you should be able to
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instantly go in there and edit. (Now actually I'm very sorry that this is not
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my machine so I'm not using my editor. Otherwise I would be able to just go
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into this slide and put the cursor in the middle and edit the slide.) At the
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same time, when I use the word "quality," it's important to remember that the
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idea of quality is completely subjective. So the Web shouldn't have in it any
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particular built-in notion of what quality means at all.</p>
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<p>There are one, two, three, four, five, six dimensions I have mentioned
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along which documents on the Web can vary. Throughout all the history and
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through the future evolution it's been very important to maintain this
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invariance with all the fancy new ideas that came in. Every now and again we
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get a new suggestion that flagrantly violates one of these areas, and we have
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to find ways to turn it around and express it in a way which does not.</p>
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<p>The last dimension of independence is an interesting one. There's a
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difference between documents and data. This division that David Williams used
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to lead originally was called "Documents and Data." There was a feeling around
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the organization that it was a very funny old name, and it should be renamed
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as "Computing and Networking," and now it's probably being renamed as
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"Information Technology," or "Information Systems". But at one point it was
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Documents and Data. And perhaps that was the silliest name at all, but
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perhaps it was the most insightful. Because on the Web you find "documents"
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of the sorts of things people read and write, and you find "data" out there
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which is the sorts of things machines read and write. And that distinction is
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interesting. And it's important that the Web should allow everything on that
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spectrum as well; that we should have things which are very specifically
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aimed at people, caligraphy and poetry. At the same time we should have hard
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data which is processable very efficiently, and logic which can be analyzed by
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a machine. And things in between. A lot of the Web is sort of things in
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between. When you hit a Web page which has stock prices on it, there is data
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on there. You're looking for data. When you look for the weather you're
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looking for data but it comes in this sort of dressed up fashion with a nice
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pink flashing border and a few ads at the top in a way that's designed to
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appeal to you and entice you to buy things.</p>
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<p>So you could think of it, if you like, as three layers: at the top, there
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is the presentation layer. For this slide it's defined by style sheet. And
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in the middle there's content, a funny word which seems to be popular on the
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Web nowadays. This, the HTML code, which says that this thing which in fact
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the style sheet had turned yellow is a first level heading, and this thing is
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an unordered list. And then underneath—there isn't a lot on this page I
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would say would be data. There's a metadata at the top which gives the
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relationship between this slide and the other slides. But the data are the
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things like the stock prices and who actually wrote this and when it was
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created, and what we think the weather is going to be like tomorrow in Boston
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and things like that.</p>
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<p>I'm going to contrast these two sides a little bit. Because when we're
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looking at the way forward and also when we're assessing how far we've got,
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those are the two benchmarks.</p>
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<p>How well are we doing? Are we doing human communication through shared
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knowledge? Let's look through the document side. On this side the languages
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are natural language. They're people talking to people. So the language is
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you just can't analyze them very well. And this is the big problem on the net
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for a lot of people, is the problem for my mother and your mother and our
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kids. They go out to search engines and they ask a question and the search
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engine gives these stupid answers. It has read a large proportion of the pages
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on the entire Web (which is of course amazing) but it doesn't understand any
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of them — and it tries to answer the question on that basis. Obviously
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you get pretty unpredictable results. However, the wonderful thing is that
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when people communicate in this way, this kind of fuzzy way, people can solve
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problems intuitively. When people browse across the Web and see something
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expressed in natural language, they think, "Aha!" and suddenly solve a totally
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unrelated problem due to the incredible ability that the human brain has to
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spot a pattern totally out of context by a huge amount of parallel
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processing.</p>
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<p>It's very important that we use this human intuitive ability because
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everything else we can automate, but we're not very good at automatically
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doing that. I wanted the Web to be what I call an interactive space where
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everybody can edit. And I started saying "interactive," and then I read in
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the media that the Web was great because it was "interactive," meaning you
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could click. This was not what I meant by interactivity, so I started calling
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it "intercreativity". (I don't generally believe in making up words to solve
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problems, so I'm sorry about this one.) What I mean is being creative with
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others. A few fundamental rules make this possible. As you can read, so you
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should be able (given the authority) to write. If you can see pictures on
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your screen, why can't you take pictures and very easily and intuitively put
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them up there? You feel that you know how to use the Web? Somebody yesterday
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asked me, "What's the problem? The Web is so intuitive. Hasn't it solved that
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problem?" I asked,<br>
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"Do you take digital photographs?" <br>
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"Yes"<br>
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"So how long does it take you to get them on a Web page so the rest of the
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family can see them?"<br>
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"Oh, I wouldn't know how to do that."</p>
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<p>We're certainly not there. At the moment I certainly cannot put the cursor
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in the middle of this slide and correct a spelling mistake. So in fact there's
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a huge amount we have to do. One of the reasons this is difficult is that
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it's actually hard. The research community produced group editors which would
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allow you to edit documents and share a document. And while two people are
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working at the same time—we know how to do that; we the academic
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community. But I don't have it here now. I can't edit this so that somebody
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watching this on a broadcast can see the edit at the same time.</p>
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<p>So one of the reasons is that it's actually hard to get the software
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working seriously, as a product. It also needs a whole lot of infrastructure.
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We need a lot more stability. We need people to learn to stop changing URL's,
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so links don't break. That's just a question often of hygiene and making an
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organizational commitment, when you put something on the Web, to keeping it
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there. But also, underneath, we need digital signature. We need digital
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signature so that when you share things with your colleagues you know that
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you're sharing it with your colleagues and you're not sharing it with just
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anybody, any hacker who happened to turn up on that strip of Ethernet. So if
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you ask me what is the most important thing for us to do over the next 35
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years, that I would hope in the next five to ten years we can fix this. We can
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fix this so that you can use the Web intuitively as the way that you express
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an "aha!", a thought, the moment that you think of something. And I can fix
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this slide the moment I realize it's got garbage on the bottom.</p>
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<p>Now a look on the other side. The other side is very different. Data has
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very well-defined meaning. So typically a huge number of Web pages are
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generated from databases. The people who produce the databases may, when they
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started it with a little spreadsheet, have had a vague idea of what the
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columns meant, but by now have a very good idea of what the columns mean. The
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database expresses well-defined relationship between things in the columns.
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When you had a weather server to pick up the temperature in Massachusetts, in
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fact the person behind it knows that this is the temperature in degrees
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Centigrade measured at seven o'clock in the morning at Logan Airport using
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this little thermometer four feet above the ground by that little bench that
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you see on the television. So there is well-defined data and there are
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well-defined things you do with it. When you write a digital check a fairly
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well-defined thing has got to happen. And when you look at your bank
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statement after having written the check and the check having even been
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cashed, there's got to be a very simple logical relationship between those
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things. You don't generally send pieces of poetry, which should give the bank
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a feel for the amount of money to pay to the payee.</p>
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<p>At the moment there's a very strange phenomenon going on. The data is being
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exported as Web pages. There are programs which want to process that data, who
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want to, for example, analyze the stock prices, who want to look at all the
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bookstores and find out where you can get that book cheapest and then present
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you with a comparative shopping list—and there are lots of Web sites out
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there. If you're not using one, do: you could save yourself some money.
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What's happening is that they are often going out to a Web site which may or
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may not be cooperative: it may just be putting that information on the Web.
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Sometimes the Web sites that they are scraping for data, would not cooperate
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if asked to. But the data is out there; it's available. And so you have one
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program which is turning it from data into documents, and another program
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which is taking the document and trying to figure out where in that mass of
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glowing flashing things is the price of the book. It picks it out from the
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third row of the second column of the third table in the page. And then when
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something changes suddenly you get the ISBN number instead of the price of a
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book and you have a problem. This process is called "screen scraping," and is
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clearly ridiculous, and the fact that everybody is doing it shows to me that
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there is a very very clear demand for actually shipping the data as data. So
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that if somebody wants to do an SQL query, if somebody wants to query an
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object out here, they don't have to go through this whole simulation of a
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very simple query in order to actually get at the data.</p>
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<p>The idea of "the semantic Web" is the side of the Web where data has
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meaning. What's meaning? I'm not suggesting that you should program your
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computer to understand the meaning of life right now. I am using meaning in
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the sense that either there is a program which knows somehow how to pay a
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check and therefore can just process a check, or somebody has to find a
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relationship between what the documents, the checks, call price and what this
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catalog calls price. So there has been a link made between the meaning of one
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column and the meaning of another. So meaning in general on the semantic Web
|
|
is defined relatively. Just like in a dictionary.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Don't panic. I'm not becoming relativist about my morals. I'm just
|
|
pointing out that all definitions that we use at the moment are relative to
|
|
other definitions and so on just as in a dictionary. One of the things which
|
|
we are doing now is we are moving to a state when all documents will be self
|
|
defining, self describing. So with the top of a document which uses all kinds
|
|
of tags like price and shoe size there will be a URL of the document that
|
|
defines exactly what shoe size means in this context. We won't have remove
|
|
this ambiguity which happened when we extended HTML and started putting cool
|
|
things like tables into HTML. People who were around in those days will
|
|
rememeber how the word spread that it would be really nice to have tables in
|
|
HTML: you couldn't put a table in a Web page before that. But everybody
|
|
started doing it at once and when anyone started a table they marked up in the
|
|
HTML code with "<code><TABLE>"</code>. So when you read "<TABLE>" you
|
|
had no idea what sort of markup was coming in. And that lasted until we
|
|
organized a global meeting of all the people involved to agree on it.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Now, we can't—every time somebody wants to think of a new idea, a new
|
|
term, a new column in a database—have a global meeting to decide about
|
|
it. We have to let people invent new terms all the time as they do anyway, but
|
|
just make sure there's no ambiguity. Also we have to allow people to combine
|
|
more than one vocabulary in the document. We don't just want to make
|
|
something which works; we want to make something which can evolve. This is
|
|
very important from the point of view of the World Wide Web Consortium
|
|
cutting itself out of the loop as much as possible.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>We have 320 members, various types—companies, organizations,
|
|
individuals—all coming together to discuss global status. and we can't
|
|
do that when you want to invent languages for pharmaceuticals, languages for
|
|
whatever your favorite new database application may be. What we need to be
|
|
able to do is to be able to send documents around which use standard
|
|
vocabulary, and add extensions in in a well-defined way; which mix in the
|
|
extensions, so that somebody who understands the standards but doesn't an
|
|
extension can figure out whether this is a problem. And in the case that the
|
|
data is in fact just informational data on the side, can process the rest.
|
|
This in fact allows us to move from using one vocabulary to another
|
|
vocabulary.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>This partial understanding sounds like a failure. But in fact partial
|
|
understanding is what allows us to actually function in the world. If you
|
|
think of an invoice, if you send an invoice from one company to another, when
|
|
it's paid, the person who allows that to be paid and sends the check off,
|
|
checks various fields on that invoice and checks that it's been authorized an
|
|
appropriate person. They check the amount, but when they look at the parts
|
|
they don't have to understand exactly what a "lower left-hand engine bearing
|
|
cover bolt bracket" is, because that part of the document is in fact
|
|
completely ignorable for purposes of paying the invoice. A huge amount of
|
|
information, stuff we read, everything that runs our business, is like that.
|
|
There are documents going around in which different people understand
|
|
different parts. And that is how we can extend the language. And that is how
|
|
we can evolve the whole of society that uses this language. If we're going to
|
|
be moving to the semantic Web we have to be able to do that.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>We've talked a lot during this fest about digital signature. And, of
|
|
course, digital signature, if we were only allowed to do it, would be
|
|
fundamental to this. And it will be fundamental to this. We have, in fact,
|
|
directly following this on Thursday and Friday, at the Consortium, a workshop
|
|
about signing XML, the basic language for data, with digital
|
|
signatures.Digital signature on top of the semantic Web turns it into a Web of
|
|
trust in which a computer can not only reason and make deductions, using not
|
|
only the logic of it, but also the model of trust. I could also talk to you
|
|
about this for six hours, but I won't.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Let's look about what happens as we scale these things up. Remember the
|
|
human side that when the Web was difficult to sell not only because looking at
|
|
two hypertext pages wasn't sufficient to make people very excited, but also
|
|
there was a certain fear that the Web would break structures. There was a lot
|
|
of people I spoke to initially wanted the Web to be hierarchical because they
|
|
wanted the hierarchical feeling of control. Or they decided the best
|
|
documentation system for them was a matrix. In fact the Web broke out of the
|
|
box and allowed you to express a hierarchy or a matrix equally well, but it
|
|
allowed you to express other things, too, which was a little bit frightening.
|
|
It's been a dramatic change for the individual. I am, of course, very
|
|
interested in whether it can be a dramatic change for society. And I've got a
|
|
feeling that I could talk for two hours about most of these points.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A really exciting thing would be if we could scale that ability to make
|
|
intuitive leaps. I've always wanted to be able to do this with a group, of
|
|
very bright, very enthusiastic people really interested in specific
|
|
overlapping areas, say LCS, or all the people who are trying to find a cure
|
|
for AIDS, or whatever. A typical thing researcher tries to do is to get as
|
|
much into his or her head at once and then hope that the solution forms, the
|
|
penny drops, that connection is made, and they can write it down before they
|
|
go to sleep. How can you get a group of people to do the same thing? Maybe if
|
|
we can use the Web as a very low bandwidth ineffective small set of neural
|
|
connections which connect the people. Imagine that one person surfing the Web
|
|
can leave a trail. In other words, if somebody, as they're surfing the Web
|
|
and they notice an interesting association and connection can represent that
|
|
with a link, then another person surfing the Web on another topic maybe find
|
|
that link and use it and as a result bring a new communal path a little bit
|
|
further on. And so the group as a whole after a while will be able to make
|
|
that "Aha!". That's something I would find very exciting.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>On the other side, promoting the machine communication is running across
|
|
all the same hopes and fears as promoting the human communication. The same
|
|
problems that—when suggesting this to somebody, it's very difficult to
|
|
explain how if you, instead of just putting a database on the Web you put it
|
|
on in a way that everything has a URL and it's part of a Web—that when
|
|
all the databases are linked together, and when there are links
|
|
meaning—when there are links between the meaning of this column and the
|
|
meaning, well, that's not very exciting when I just described it as, you know,
|
|
the last name in this is the same as the last name in this. But imagine that
|
|
all the last name columns in all the databases on the Web were all directly
|
|
or indirectly linked together by links. Then effectively you'd be able to join
|
|
any databases that talk about the last name of a person on that together.
|
|
You'd be able to query the whole Web as all the data on Web is one huge
|
|
database. Which would be very very powerful, and I'm glad we talked about
|
|
privacy yesterday. So the same rules have to apply. Anything can refer to
|
|
anything. Wherever there was an identifier in your data language suddenly you
|
|
have to be able to use a URI, and there's a certain amount of resistance to
|
|
that. Because people want to maintain the fact that the systems are
|
|
predictable. They don't want the language to become too expressive, because
|
|
computer science is all about—this is perhaps a little unfair—the
|
|
art of designing languages which are sufficiently constraining so that you
|
|
can only write solvable problems in them. If you look at a particular query or
|
|
you look at the language of writing what you can ask an ATM to do it's very
|
|
simple, because an ATM can only do a few things. But when you link together
|
|
all the data you end up with a representation of the world, and the world is
|
|
a very complex place, and you need an arbitrarily expressive language for
|
|
expressing that.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>We end up with this tension between that and systems which we will be
|
|
producing which will be predictable, like checks. We will have to constrain
|
|
the checks so that you can only put an integer in there. You cannot put an
|
|
expression, say that this is "pay the bearer on demand the smallest number
|
|
expresseable in two distinct ways as the sum of two cubes", or something which
|
|
Ron will cook up you can only calculate it in 35 years. People want that check
|
|
to terminate. They want the payment to happen in a finite time. They're very
|
|
worried when we suggest that the underlying structure for this will be very
|
|
expressive. But in fact, when you put all these systems together, the result
|
|
will be all the independent machines — Michael's bulldozers—
|
|
taken together will be a huge very very complex map of the world.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>I used to say that the Web would mimic the world. In fact, it ends up being
|
|
the world to a certain extent. So the well be on their heuristics, we will not
|
|
have to use heuristics, don't panic, in order to pay checks. But it will be a
|
|
very exciting place to explore algorithms which break what we call the closed
|
|
world assumption of the people who try to export things in boxes without any
|
|
breathing holes. Of course, the really exciting thing happens when we mix the
|
|
two worlds. I don't know we can solve any serious problems unless we do. I'm
|
|
not asking for the machines to join the human world with artificial
|
|
intelligence. I'm happy for other people to ask for that. But I'm just saying
|
|
that if we as humans, when we have gone already to the trouble of putting data
|
|
into databases, putting our schedules, our appointments into a schedule
|
|
database—we've already in other cases done that; it's in a very
|
|
well-defined form. Let's not lose that information. Let's not lose that
|
|
semantics. Let's use it. Let's digitally sign it. Let's allow machines to
|
|
start operating on it. And with this mixture of predictable mechanisms of
|
|
heuristics I think it should be very exciting. For me the fundamental Web is
|
|
the Web of people. It's not the Web of machines talking to each other; it's
|
|
not the network of machines talking to each other. It's not the Web of
|
|
documents. Remember when machines talked to each other over some protocol,
|
|
two machines are talking on behalf of two people. The Consortium has a whole
|
|
technical domain "Technology and Society" which recognizes that, at the end
|
|
of the day, if we're not doing something for the Web of People, then we're
|
|
really not doing something useful at all.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Originally it was social need that drove me to make the Web in the first
|
|
place. In the future one of the exciting things is finding what I call social
|
|
machines. We know about working groups and we know about social voting
|
|
structures and we know about all sorts of social systems, and a lot of people
|
|
are very excited about what sort of new social systems we can make on the
|
|
Web, which maybe can be run by little machines; things that you can log onto
|
|
and become part of and progress, just as we progress documents along
|
|
standardization tracks, as we endorse things. We can invent new forms which
|
|
maybe will allow us to exploit the fact that we don't have geographical
|
|
boundaries anymore. I'm very interested in a more fractal, less hierarchical
|
|
structure arising in society, allowing us to operate using the web of trust.
|
|
Perhaps we can, now that we've got machines that can help us find out
|
|
individually where we best fit, how we can weave ourselves into the Web to
|
|
contribute best to society. Maybe we can continue another very small step
|
|
along that path that we started when we stopped (some of us, most of the time)
|
|
using violence to settle or to decide things, and moved on to using money, or
|
|
in some cases stopped using money and started actually thinking about what
|
|
other people were feeling and trying to do, and sharing their goals. Maybe
|
|
we can find new systems based on peer respect, in which we work together and
|
|
appreciate that we are all in fact trying to go in the same direction. To me
|
|
that would be very exciting and make the whole thing worthwhile. Thank you
|
|
very much for your attention.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>[Applause.]</p>
|
|
|
|
<p></p>
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</body>
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