Sir Tim Berners-Lee is also encouraging governments to make more data available online

Oct 13, 2009 11:20 GMT  ·  By
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, director of the W3C, is encouraging governments to make more data available online
   Sir Tim Berners-Lee, director of the W3C, is encouraging governments to make more data available online

Speaking at a technology symposium at the Finnish Embassy in Washington, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web as we know it today and the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, the web standards organization, made some comments about the future of the Internet, and the need for governments to get more involved and open more data online, On a lighter note, he also mentioned that the ever-present “//” after the colon in every web address was largely unnecessary and perhaps he shouldn't have added them to the nascent standard.

“Look at all the paper and trees,” he told New York Times reporter Steve Lohr in the interview, “that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years — not to mention the human labor and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes. The “//” was a programing convention at the time and it indicated that this was the “root” of the URL but in retrospect Berners-Lee believes the web could have done well without it.

He went on to speak about the future of the Internet, more specifically about what is called the “semantic web,” the need to have the meaning of all of the data online known, making it easier for all of the different information scattered on the web to be correlated and put in context. There has been a drive towards this and search engines like Google's Squared project are trying to structure the data available in a meaningful way.

Berners-Lee also spoke about the latest move to encourage governments to make more data available online for the public and interested parties to provide for a more transparent and open process but also for better efficiency. He cited the efforts of the British government in making more information open and also listed some of the practical benefits of this move. The White House has also been on a campaign to move some operations online and make data more easily available.