Tim Berners-Lee

Went to a lecture at The Royal Society given by Tim Berners-Lee this evening. He made some interesting points in a frenetic and charasmatic style. The main thing I took away was that his initial vision of the web was bourne of the requirements for a document control and sharing protocol. A founding principle of this was independence from software or hardware platform, network accessibility, application, language, culture, disability... and so on.

"To seperate content from form is good design." was one statement that I've heard before, but rarely has it had as much resonance as when put in context of the lofty goals of what the architects of the web set out to achieve. The standards laid out by WC3 have been a little lost on me in my more ignorant past. Over time I have realised that the standard is our friend and to deny it for aesthetics, economy or perceived flexibility, is short sighted.

Tim Berners-Lee made me realise that web ubiquity will only be achieved through a combination of standards and goal directed design. This is what will lead us to his vision of The Semantic Web. He uses the metaphor of the London Underground tube map to illustrate a web connected by RDF ontologies. Different lines represent different data properties of a relational database (e.g. calendar or event). Where those properties intersect (represented by an interchange on the tube map) with a subject (e.g. time or location), we find a value which is of real usefulness in our everyday lives. At the moment, those properties and subjects do not intersect to create values in terms of the aforementioned application and platform independence. Instead, we have to 'manually' connect them in our heads. In this regard, we are still pre-web (if we go by the measure of what the web set out to achieve).

You should be able to find his whole presentation here. You can also find a less cumbersome explaination some of what I'm rambling about at Paul's blog.