Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us to 'Ignore' Web3

Too vague?  Also a hit on Blockchain as "too slow, too expensive, and too public.".

Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us to 'Ignore' Web3

CNBC News, Ryan Browne, November 4, 2022

ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web, considers Web3 nonviable for building the next iteration of the Internet. At the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Berners-Lee called Web3 a vague term to describe a theoretical Internet that is more decentralized than the current Web, incorporating technologies like blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and nonfungible tokens. Berners-Lee described blockchain protocols as "too slow, too expensive, and too public." He said people frequently confuse Web3 with his Web 3.0 framework for reconfiguring the Internet. His new Inrupt startup intends to allow users to control their own data via a global single sign-on feature for universal logins, login IDs that let users exchange data, and a "common universal application programming interface."

Full Article   

Berners-Lee Wants Meta VR

 Interesting view here.    But in particular if you see VR as a means of  interacting with lots of complex visual contextual data, its like interacting with data in a structured Web. 

ACM TECHNEWS

World Wide Web's Creator Wants Metaverse VR     By Bloomberg, May 13, 2022

World Wide Web creator and 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Tim Berners-Lee expects virtual reality (VR) and metaverse-associated technologies to shape future online interaction.

"People ask about virtual reality, and if the metaverse is going to be the whole future, and the answer is that it's going to be part of the future," he said., Berners-Lee said he envisions VR becoming a new form of media, one in which "you'll be able to sit between a movie and a VR world of that movie, for example."

He is firmly opposed to the largest technology companies controlling much of their users' personal data. ...

“People ask about virtual reality, and if the metaverse is going to be the whole future, and the answer is that it’s going to be part of the future,” Berners-Lee said. ... 

From Bloomberg

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Remaking the Web

We need a remake.  With caution to include freedom of communication.

 He Created the Web. Now He's Out to Remake the Digital World.

The New York Times,   Steve Lohr,   January 10, 2021

World Wide Web creator and 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Tim Berners-Lee hopes to bring the Web back to his original vision of a decentralized marketplace through personal online data stores (pods), with users controlling their data in individual vaults. Berners-Lee co-founded the startup Inrupt, which will charge licensing fees for its commercial software, using Solid open source software along with augmented security, management, and developer tools. Pods are free for users, and Inrupt expects initial sponsors will be trusted organizations. Increasingly intelligent data protection technology is placing competitive pressure on the big tech firms; Georgia Institute of Technology's Peter Swire said this creates "a market opportunity for Tim Berners-Lee's firm and others to offer individuals better ways to control their data."

NHS Signs Up for Tim Berners-Lee Pilot to Reinvent Web

 Becoming necessary, if only for security,  But the design needs to be carefully done to ensure freedom of speech.

NHS Signs Up for Tim Berners-Lee Pilot to Reinvent Web  (Paywall) 

From Financial Times   John Thornhill

The U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) is one of more than a dozen partners that have signed up for a pilot program of Inrupt, a company founded by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, to promote a new Web data architecture. Inrupt launched its first enterprise-ready social-inked data (Solid) servers, which Berners-Lee, recipient of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award, called a "huge milestone" in breaking down existing data silos and recreating more interconnected networks. Solid, co-developed by Berners-Lee and Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientists, enables users to produce their own Pods (personal online data stores) in order to control and grant access to third-party applications. The NHS is running a pilot project that lets users store their personal medical data in their own Pods, upload additional information from other lifestyle apps, and share that data with doctors and care providers.  ... '

Berners-Lee Launches a Contract for the Web

Admirable, but will it work?  As one of the inventors of the Web, he will be heard, but will the contract be accepted, followed?

Tim Berners-Lee Launches a 'Contract for the Web' to Govern Internet Giants, Governments
Computing
By Graeme Burton
November 25, 2019

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, recipient of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his invention of the World Wide Web, has launched a global plan of action to govern the behavior of Internet giants and governments. The Contract for the Web, which says it aims "to make our online world safe and empowering for everyone," includes nine principles: three aimed at governments, three for companies, and three for individuals. Governments must ensure everyone can connect to the Internet, keep all of the Internet available all the time, and respect people's fundamental online privacy and data rights. Companies must provide affordable Internet access to everyone, respect and protect people's online privacy and personal data, and develop technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst. Individuals must be creators and collaborators on the Web, build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity, and fight to keep the Web open and a global public resource. .... " 

The Web We Wanted at 30: By Tim Berners-Lee

Have seen a number of interviews with Tim Berners-Lee out on the Web turning 30, and how it has differed from expectations.  Agree too, early saw it as an internal, efficiency thing for knowledge linking and sharing, and certainly did not expect the fast universal commercial up take and negative aspects.   Though we should always consider unexpected consequences.  The risk turned out higher than we thought.

At Age 30, World Wide Web Is 'Not the Web We Wanted' 
Associated Press  By Jamey Keaten

Father of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee took the occasion of his invention's 30-year anniversary to discuss how its intended purpose has come up short, from a space for progress-oriented collaboration to a place saturated with intrusive surveillance, disinformation, and corporate control. At a conference at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, Berners-Lee said his World Wide Web Foundation hopes to recruit governments, companies, and citizens to play a bigger role in transforming the Web for good under principles outlined by its "Contract for the Web." The document calls on governments to ensure universal Internet connectivity, availability, and privacy, while companies would need to keep the Internet affordable and private, and develop technology to uphold the "public good." Citizens' responsibility is for creating, cooperating, and respecting "civil discourse." Berners-Lee said the main challenge is balancing out oversight and freedom.... "

Berners-Lee Solid Project

More on Berners-Lee's SOlid Project, aimed to save the Web.  Informative.  Un-wall the gardens?  Better privacy and identity?   Too late?

Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid Project: Can It Save the Web?    By David Cardinal 

Not everyone thinks the web needs saving. After all, it’s a bigger and more essential part of our lives than almost anyone could have predicted when Tim Berners-Lee first wrote a browser for what became the World Wide Web. But the original peer-to-peer, open-protocol, read-write architecture has been overshadowed in many ways by walled gardens like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. One reason for that is that the original web protocols were limited. While they provided the means for browsing and linking, they didn’t come with standard solutions for identity, personal data storage, or social applications. So corporations stepped in to fill the void with their own best interests at heart and not those of their customers or the web at large. Decades later, Berners-Lee thinks he has a solution: his Solid (SOcial LInked Data) system.

Berners-Lee Says we can Control our Data, and Need to do it Now

But how will this influence the economics of the Web in the last decade?  Will the economics be there to continue to drive its development?  Or will it go back to an excellent academic system?  Reading more.   Excellent description here, and see also  https://solid.inrupt.com/

One Small Step for the Web…
By Tim Berners-Lee in Medium

Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) w3.org, the place to agree on web standards. Founded webfoundation.org - let the web serve humanity

I’ve always believed the web is for everyone. That’s why I and others fight fiercely to protect it. The changes we’ve managed to bring have created a better and more connected world. But for all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas.

Today, I believe we’ve reached a critical tipping point, and that powerful change for the better is possible — and necessary.

This is why I have, over recent years, been working with a few people at MIT and elsewhere to develop Solid, an open-source project to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web.

Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we’ve all discovered, this hasn’t been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance — by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way.  ... "

Also see: https://solid.inrupt.com/ for more about their approach.

Berners-Lee on Past and Future of the Web

Agree, if only for the construction of the Wikipedia, it would have been worth inventing and Building the Web.   When we experimented with early hypertext knowledge storage ideas we started to see the value emerge, but had no idea what was coming. Not Utopia, but another world.

From Utopia to Dystopia, and Back Again   By Bennie Mols

Last year, Sir Tim Berners-Lee received the ACM A.M. Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and the "Nobel Prize of computing," for his invention of the World Wide Web, the first Web browser, "and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale."

Berners-Lee proposed what we now call the Web in 1989, while he was working for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland (his boss at the time called his proposal "vague, but exciting").

During the Turing Award Lecture he presented last week at the Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, during the 10th International ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci'18), Berners-Lee led the audience on a passionate route along the past, present, and future of the Web; "From Utopia to Dystopia and back again?" as he called it.

Back in 1989, the same year in which central and eastern Europe were full of political turmoil—with the fall of the Berlin Wall as an iconic highlight—and in which the world was full of new political dreams, the World Wide Web that Berners-Lee envisioned was similarly full of dreams. He felt the Web should become an open, decentralized platform where everybody should be able to share information across geographic and cultural boundaries, allowing creativity and cooperation to bloom.

These dreams have only partly come true, said Berners-Lee.  As an example, he points to Wikipedia: "It's amazing that humanity has created something like Wikipedia. Only for this was it worth to have invented the Web."

In recent years, however, the Web has suffered some collateral damage, said Berners-Lee, who said he worries about the loss of control over personal data, the ease with which misinformation can spread, the personalization of political advertising, and the power of social media platforms.

"You can see these things as emergent phenomena that couldn't have been predicted from the original design," said Berners-Lee. "The way in which people interact with the Web is very complicated. We now have about the same number of Web pages as humans have neurons in the brain. We do not understand the brain very well, and therefore we need neuroscience and cognitive science; in the same way, we need Web science as a separate discipline. Web science can, along with the social sciences, help us to understand how the Web works. It can also help us to build better systems which lead people to be constructive."   .... "

Berners-Lee on Weaving the Web

Good piece and video on Tim Berners-Lee in the CACM.   We experimented with the idea of hyperlinks in the 80s for knowledge capture and delivery.   But the broader linkage to docs anywhere. created by anyone, took more time to follow.  That was Knowledge you could weave, maintain and browse.  Even do commerce with.

Home/Magazine Archive/June 2017 (Vol. 60, No. 6)/Weaving the Web/Full Text
Weaving the Web  By Neil Savage 
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 60 No. 6, Pages 20-22

When he first came up with the idea for the World Wide Web in 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee had trouble getting people to grasp the concept. If he gave a lecture to a room of 100 people, demonstrating how his browser/editor could jump from one document to another when he clicked on a hypertext link, he recalls, the response would be a collective "So what?"

"Maybe two or three at the back would get it. Most people wouldn't," says Berners-Lee. .... " 

First Web Site Went Public 25 Years Ago

Quite an interesting anniversary.  Tim Berners-Lee 1991 announcement of his Web Project.  Its interesting that one of the other primary components of the Web, the hyperlink, existed before then. We used it as a means to link text definitions, calling it hypertext, as early as 1983.

Linked Data in the Enterprise

I am reminded of the term,  definition from the WP below:    What are the best examples of its use in the enterprise?   The DBPedia is an easily understandable example, where the data is derived from the Wikipedia or similar data.    We examine the potential for DBpedia use.  Enterprise examples of use?  See tag links below.

" .... In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried.[1]
Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), coined the term in a 2006 design note about the Semantic Web project. ....  "

Linked Data for Gathering Knowledge

I was referred back to the use of what is called Linked Data:   In the WP: 

" ... In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried.[1]
Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, coined the term in a design note discussing issues around the Semantic Web project.[2] ... " 

How Many Pages on the Internet

I like numbers.  Have heard many estimates over the years.  Billions at first.  Trillions some say.  Now a new effort is underway to estimate the size of the net.  Apparently even Google does not know. " ... A group called the World Wide Web Foundation -- appropriately founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who pretty much created the internet -- is on a quest to figure out, with some degree certainty, how big the internet really is. With a $1 million grant from Google, the foundation plans to release the results of its online forensic search, called the World Wide Web Index, early next year, the foundation's CEO, Steve Bratt, said in a recent interview.

If Berners-Lee Had Patented the Web

If Berners-Lee had sought and received a patent for the Web, it would just now be coming out of patent protection.  The consequences of that?  What does that tell us about the patent systems?

Growth of Linked Data

I have covered the concept of 'Linked Data' here before.  A good piece in ReadWriteWeb on how the idea is continuing to grow. Also a site of interest, LinkedData.org, where they define the concept:

" ... The Web enables us to link related documents. Similarly it enables us to link related data. The term Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. Key technologies that support Linked Data are URIs (a generic means to identify entities or concepts in the world), HTTP (a simple yet universal mechanism for retrieving resources, or descriptions of resources), and RDF (a generic graph-based data model with which to structure and link data that describes things in the world). (Contributor: Tom Heath, including excerpts from Bizer, Heath and Berners-Lee (in press)) ... "

Berners-Lee and the Mobile Web

In Read Write Web: Comments by the Web Inventor Berners-Lee on concerns with important issues regarding the mobile Web. Some points I had not thought of. Inevitable though that the Web combined with mobile-sensed information, will continue to expand.

Berners-Lee Building Web of Data

Intriguing and a natural expansion on the notion of a semantic web, plus looking at the infrastructure required to deliver it. In ReadWriteWeb:

Inventor of the Web Gets Backing to Build Web of Data

' .. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt will lead a new British Institute for Web Science with $45 million in government backing. The announcement was not without its critics, but the Institute could have a world-wide impact.

The two men collaborated in helping build the excellent data.gov.uk and will now expand upon that work. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said of the move: "We are determined to go further in breaking down the walled garden of Government...This Institute will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies." ... '

Web 2.0 Summit

The Web TV Summit is underway and its live video stream can be accessed here. Interesting speakers on the topic, including Berners-Lee. I believe it will be archived in full.

Berners-Lee on Linked Data

This ReadWrite Web post points to a good TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee and give you an overview of the topic of Linked Data. With the suggestion that this is the next evolution of the Web. The idea is to link together the many ontologies (knowledge structures) that exist on the Web today to make the whole Web more useful. Makes sense. The TED talk is an excellent start to understanding this, plus many more links in the post.