Architect of Web seeks to enhance it

If your first big invention is the World Wide Web, what do you do for an encore? Tim Berners-Lee, the English researcher who created the Web in 1990, has been working on that for a long time.

Berners-Lee's development of the Web, done with fellow researchers Mike Sendall and Robert Calliau, was part of a project at the European research lab CERN to make the Internet more intuitive.

Before Berners-Lee's work, there was no Web surfing. Now he thinks the next step in making the Web more useful is to create the standards that enable computers to fully understand the Web and that allow users to find the right information more efficiently.

He and many other forward thinkers are working on the "semantic Web," an enhancement that would provide a universal exchange of data. The semantic Web is sometimes called "Web 3.0," after the Web (Web 1.0) and the social Web (Web 2.0).

If this makes you go "huh?" I'm with you. But semantic Web searches can be expressed in natural language, such as "Where can I find the nearest store with cheap Manolo Blahnik shoes?" Web search engines can more easily come up with the right answers because they can access the right data from Web pages.

"We're trying to get the Web to live up to its full potential," Berners-Lee said at a recent talk at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. "We're trying to keep it good, keep it useful and keep it working."

Two types of files

Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium and a computer-science professor at the University of Southampton in England, explained that there are two basic types of files on the Web: documents and data.

Documents already are easily accessed. But data, such as your computerized calendar or banking information, are harder to access and use in applications that still protect privacy.

If you enter your data on a Web site, another Web site should be able to understand it and use it. If you're using Facebook in the future, for instance, you might authorize it to use your personal data to verify your identity.

And if you make travel plans, you may want to tell the right friends on Facebook without giving them access to too much information.

Important, complicated

The semantic Web, Berners-Lee said, should be smart enough to negotiate all of the necessary permissions between Web sites without exposing you to security risks or privacy violations.

This may sound dry. But it's important and complicated, Berners-Lee said. If we don't do this correctly, we end up with archaic fossils that have no place in the modern Web.

For instance, if Berners-Lee hadn't designed the Web well, the growth of the Web might have been inhibited.

Berners-Lee has been working on this project full time since 2004, and I'll put my money on him. He's had the help of HP Labs, which helped create a programming language as the foundation of the semantic Web.

"We're very excited about the work he is doing," said Susie Wee, director of the HP Labs Mobile & Media Systems Lab. "He is an inspirational role model."

The semantic Web will extend the usefulness of the Web, but that's not the end of Berners-Lee's ambitions. Since last year, he has also been promoting Web science.

He wants to involve the research community in deciphering the living, breathing Web and researching it the same way that researchers explore complex organisms such as the brain. He estimates that the number of Web pages out there is 100 billion.

"That's more than the number of neurons in the brain," he said. "It suggests that to understand it, we really have to study it as a science, as we do with the brain."

Dean Takahashi

is a technology columnist

at the San Jose Mercury News.