When Sir Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the foundations of the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, his manager called it “vague, but exciting.” How things have changed since then! Twenty-six years later, Berners-Lee won the ACM Turing Award “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first Web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.” This book is a compilation of articles on the original ideas of a true visionary and the subsequent research and development work he has led, helping to realize the Web’s full potential. It is intended for readers interested in the Web’s original technical development, how it has changed over time, and the social impacts of the Web as steered by Berners-Lee since the very beginning.
The book covers Berners-Lee’s development of the key protocols, naming schemes, and markup languages that led to his “world wide web” program and ultimately to the Web as we know it today. His early efforts were refined as Web technology spread around the world, and he was further guided by the work of the World Wide Web Consortium, which he founded and still directs. He was instrumental in the conceptualization and realization of the Semantic Web, a field that is gaining momentum in the age of big data and knowledge graph; was a driving force for the field of Web Science, a new and growing research area dedicated to the study of both the engineering and the impacts of the Web; and he continues to innovate through his research work at MIT on open and decentralized information. Berners-Lee is also known for his contributions to keeping the Web open and ubiquitous via his work with the World Wide Web Foundation, the UK’s Open Data Institute and his recent call for a crowd-sourced magna carta for the Web. This book will help the reader to understand how Sir Tim’s invention of the World Wide Web has revolutionized not just Computer Science, but global society itself.
Table of Contents
I Introduction
1. This is for Everyone
2. Utopia to Dystopia and Back Again
II Weaving the Web
3.
The World Wide Web
4. Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web
5. Building for Search Engines: Following REST
III Making the Web Meaningful
6. The Semantic Web: A New Form of Web Content that is Meaningful to Computers will Unleash a Revolution of New Possibilities
7. The Impact of the Web on Information Retrieval
8. Linked Data – The Story so Far
9. Linking the World’s Data
IV Understanding and Protecting the Web’s Mission
10. The World Wide Web Consortium
11. The Open Data Revolution
12. A Web for Everyone
V Weaving the Web for the Future
13. Decentralization: The Future of Online Social Networking
14. Tim Berners-Lee’s Research at the Decentralized Information Group at MIT
15. Re-decentralizing the Web, for Good This Time
16. What the World Needs to Keep Learning from Tim Berners-Lee’s Creation of the Web
About the Author(s)
Oshani Seneviratne, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Oshani Seneviratne is the Associate Director of the Tetherless World Constellation and an Assistant Professor in Computer Science. She was previously the Director of Health Data Research at the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Applications. Oshani obtained her S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Before Rensselaer, Oshani worked at Oracle, specializing in knowledge representation, provenance, and healthcare-related research.
James Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
James Hendler is the Director of the Future of Computing Institute and the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at RPI and is also director of the RPI-IBM Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration. Hendler is a data scientist with specific interests in open government and scientific data, data science for healthcare, AI and machine learning, semantic data integration and the use of data in government. One of the originators of the Semantic Web, he has authored over 450 books, technical papers, and articles in the areas of Open Data, the Semantic Web, artificial intelligence, and data policy and governance. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002. He is the first computer scientist ever to have served on the Board of Reviewing editors for Science.
