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<p></p>

<p>Transcript of <a
href="http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Overview.html#Talks">Tim
Berners-Lee</a>'s talk to the LCS 35th Anniversary celebrations, Cambridge
Massachusetts, 1999/April/14. See also:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="../../Talks/1999/0414-LCS35-tbl/slide1-1.html">Slides</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.lcs.mit.edu/">MIT Laboratory for Computer Science</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.lcs.mit.edu/anniv/agenda/">MIT LCS 35th Anniversary
</a>(April 1999)
</li>
</ul>

<p>[edited for comprehensibility]</p>

<p></p>

<p>TIM BERNERS-LEE: It's a great pleasure to be addressing you on this 35th
anniversary. Of  course, it's a 35th anniversary of LCS, and it's also the
35th anniversary  of the Web, if you count in Web years.  [Laughter.]</p>

<p>I will say a little bit about where I'm coming from, what the original idea
was, because I don't want to talk about the future as a prediction. I don't
give predictions. That I leave to Bob. It's dangerous: you end up eating your
articles, and so I will stick to talking about what  I would like to see
partly because when there are a bunch of people from LCS  in the audience, the
next thing you find is somebody has come around to your office,  knocked on
the door, and said that, by the way, they've done it.</p>

<p>When I'm talking about what I would like to see, you know, it  hasn't
changed very much in ten years. So if I talk about where I'm coming from, what
I  wanted to see then, then, that's two-thirds of my hopes for the future.
I'll give a little bit of history of how where the World Wide Web Consortium
came to  LCS, and then I'll talk a bit about the Web and about an interesting
distinction  between what we used to call documents, and what we used to call
data.</p>

<p>The basic ideas of the Web is that an information space through which
people can  communicate, but communicate in a special way: communicate by
sharing their  knowledge in a pool. The idea was not just that it should be a
big browsing medium. The idea was that everybody would be putting their  ideas
in, as well as taking them out. This is not supposed to be a  glorified
television channel Also everybody should be excited about the  power to
actually create hypertext.  Writing hypertext is good fun, and  being with a
group of people writing hypertext and trying to work something  out, by making
links is a different way of working. I hoped that it  would be a way that
soon, for example, the European Particle Physics Laboratory at Geneva,
Switzerland, where I was at the time. I'd hoped it would be a way for us to
much more efficiently use people who came and went, use student work,  use
people working remotely. And leave a trail, not a paper trail, but a  trail in
hyperspace.</p>

<p>So I had hoped that the Web would be a tool for us, understanding each
other and working together efficiently on larger scales. Getting over the
problem which befalls the organization that was so fun when it was a start-up
of six people (many of you will know about this phenomenon).  When you get to
60 people it is still great fun, and you're still rollerblading in the parking
lot. And then when you get to 61 people, you worry that you don't know that
person's name, and the difficulties of scaling the organization set in.</p>

<p>There's a second half to the dream really, and I must admit that originally
I was  a little bit careful about expressing this.  But the second half is the
hope that when  we've got all of our organization communicating together
through this medium which is accessible to machines, to computer programs,
that there will be some cool computer programs which we could write to analyze
that stuff: to figure out how the organization really runs; and what is its
real structure, never mind the structure we have given it;  and all kinds of
things like that. And to do that, of course, the information on the Web  would
have to be understandable to some extent by a machine and at the moment it's
not.</p>

<p>Here is a very basic history overview.  I originally wrote a proposal.
That's the piece of paper which I dropped  into the time capsule, for those of
you who were at the party. I wrote the  proposal in 1989 and tried to explain
that I thought the global hypertext  would be a great idea. Now, the world is
full of people writing these  proposals and since Vennevor Bush started in
1945 and it was published in  the Atlantic Monthly and still nobody developed
a global hypertext system.  And then Doug Enbgelbart actually showed people
how to do it two decades  later, and still it didn't happen because he just
didn't happen to be in the  right place at the right time. But I was.</p>

<p>I was in right place in that  the European particle physics community was
full of people with machines  on their desk &mdash;  now just about starting
to be Internet worked: connected to the Internet as opposed to all sorts of
proprietary networks. And I was at a place where my boss Mike Sandel and his
boss David Williams, who is sitting down here, were prepared to not say no.
They let me go ahead and do it, "even though we can't actually justify it."
That happened actually in 1990 when I bought one of those new NeXT machines,
which was a great programming environment in lots of ways. I could actually
put together a hypertext editor,  (browser/editor; it was the same
thing&mdash;It was modeless) pretty quickly.  And then in the summer of '91 we
actually released the  code, put it up on an FTP server and drew people's
attention to the first  Web site and the first Web client and started to try
to push this. It was still very difficult, you know, to explain how exciting
global hypertext is if you only have a couple of Web pages.   That may seem
silly now and obvious, but it's very difficult to show the excitement in  one
Web page.</p>

<p>The excitement of a hypertext link is that it can point to anything  out
there. When there's nothing out there then that is just difficult  to
demonstrate. So for several years it's a question of first trying to  justify
my existence. In fact I wasn't working on anything else, and the  other people
who had got onto the team one way or another. They sort of slipped through,
working in different places, working  across the world collaborating over the
Internet. And persuading people to  put out Web browsers was tricky.  It
involved all kinds of doing sneaky things,  suggesting that they needed a Web
browser for a very specific application  so that they would get it and then
that they would be&mdash;they would just  increase the number of clients out
there which would increase the incentive  for somebody to put up a server and
vice-versa. And eventually the thing  started snowballing.</p>

<p>Now, in 1992 it was clear that it was taking off. It still wasn't clear
that it would, for example ever take over from the Internet Gopher,  which was
another system expanding exponentially on the  Internet. But people were
already starting to come into my office.  Alan Kotok from Digital came with
three colleagues, unannounced. Now, people  don't generally drop in Geneva
unannounced, particularly Americans.   We found a conference room quickly and
he explained that they were starting to investigate what Digital should do,
how Digital should address  this "Internet" and the World Wide Web.  "We're
concerned about stability and  we understand that it all hinges on some
specifications which you have  stored on a disk somewhere..".  They wondered
how stable they were and how  we get to insure their continued stability and
their evolution.</p>

<p>I started talking with them and other people about what sort of a  body we
needed to make sure that the Web would evolve into something we could
use&mdash;now it  was becoming a serious thing. They were very adamant, like
everyone  else, that there should be some neutral forum where people could
meet.  I started shopping around. I looked at a number of  different
possibilities:  setting it up as a company; joining a large company  and
setting it up base there, setting it up at some other institution. I traveled
around a bit and talked to a lot of people and there's one place which came up
with checks in all the boxes. In fact it  was on a bus going from a conference
dinner in Newcastle in northern England on one rainy night to a small hotel
that I sat next to David Gifford from LCS, who listened to the story politely
and said I  should mail this Michael D
something&mdash;<code>mld@hq.lcs.mit.edu</code>&mdash;and he might  be
interested.</p>

<p>I did and next thing Michael dropped in in Zurich and from  then on I
discovered that not only could I sell him the idea of setting up  as a base in
the U.S. but I could sell him on the idea of setting it up as  an
international thing. He was just as enthusiastic as me about  that. So that's
the story of how the Web Consortium came to LCS. And the  rest is more or less
history and acronyms, and I won't to into the acronyms  in case you are
frightened about them. But basically things have been  happening.</p>

<p>The fundamental thing about the space&mdash;about this Web, as I said, is
that anything  can refer to anything. Otherwise it's no fun. You've got to be
able to  make the link to anything. It's no good asking people to put things
on the Web, saying that anything of importance should have this "URL",if you
then request anything else. To  make such an audacious request you have to
then release anything else. So  that requires that the Web has completely
minimalist design. We don't  impose anything else. It has to be independent of
anything.  The great challenge, really the raison d'etre initially for getting
the Web protocols out, was to be independent of hardware platform: to be able
to  see the stuff on the mainframe from your PC and to be able to see the
stuff  on the PC from the Mac. To get across those boundaries was at the time
so  huge and strange and unbelievable. And if we don't do things right it will
be huge and strange and unbelievable again:  we could go back down that route
very easily.</p>

<p>It was important to get it should be independent of software. The World
Wide Web originally was a client program called "World  Wide Web". I
eventually renamed the program because I didn't want the World Wide  Web to be
one program. It's very important that any program that can talk the World Wide
Web protocols&mdash;(HTTP, HTML,...) can provide equivalent access to the
information.</p>

<p>It's very important to be independent of the way you actually happen to
access this information. We're using a rather large screen here but it  works
just as well on this small screen. It should also work if you need  to have
these read to you, because maybe you're visually impaired or maybe  you're
driving along. 20 percent of the people who have access to the Web have some
sort of  impairment; maybe they can see the screen fine but they can't use a
mouse.  So it's very important that we separate the content from the way we're
presenting it.  This slide is just an HTML file, but it has a style sheet that
says it needs to be big and it  should be white on blue according to the
guidelines.</p>

<p>It's important that the Web should be independent of language and culture,
and I could now talk for two hours just about that. In the  Consortium, just
as we have a Web accessibility initiative addressed the question of
accessibility, we have  an activity which looks specifically about
internationalization. But then  you have to add culture, then you're talking
about a whole lot more than  just using Unicode and just making sure that you
can make the letters go  up and down the page instead of across the page.</p>

<p>It's important that the Web should be independent of quality of
information. I don't want it to be somewhere where you would publish technical
reports only after you had finished. If you can link to anything I want this
to be part of the process. So the review of the technical report and the
scribbling of the original note which led to the idea that became the project
which resulted in the technical report should all be there and they should all
be linked together. So it's very important that you should be  able to
instantly go in there and edit.  (Now actually I'm very sorry that this is not
my machine so  I'm not using my editor. Otherwise I would be able to just go
into this slide and  put the cursor in the middle and edit the slide.)  At the
same time, when I use the word "quality," it's important to remember that the
idea of quality is  completely subjective. So the Web shouldn't have in it any
particular built-in notion of what quality means at all.</p>

<p>There are one, two, three, four,  five, six dimensions I have mentioned
along which documents on  the Web can vary. Throughout all the history and
through the future evolution it's been very important to maintain this
invariance  with all the fancy new ideas that came in. Every now and again we
get  a new suggestion that flagrantly violates one of these areas, and we have
to find ways to turn it around and express it in a way which  does not.</p>

<p>The last dimension of independence is an interesting one. There's a
difference between  documents and data. This division that David Williams used
to lead originally was called "Documents and Data." There was a feeling around
the organization that it was a very funny old name, and it should be  renamed
as "Computing and Networking," and now it's probably being renamed  as
"Information Technology," or "Information Systems". But at one point  it was
Documents and Data. And perhaps that was the silliest name at all,  but
perhaps it was the most insightful.  Because on the Web you find "documents"
of the sorts of things people read and write, and you find "data" out there
which is the sorts of things machines read and write. And that distinction  is
interesting. And it's important that the Web should allow everything on  that
spectrum as well; that we should have things which are very  specifically
aimed at people, caligraphy and poetry. At the same time we should have hard
data which is processable very efficiently, and logic which can be analyzed by
a machine. And things in  between.   A lot of the Web is sort of things in
between. When you hit a Web page  which has stock prices on it, there is data
on there. You're looking for  data. When you look for the weather you're
looking for data but it comes in  this sort of dressed up fashion with a nice
pink flashing border and a few  ads at the top in a way that's designed to
appeal to you and entice you to  buy things.</p>

<p>So you could think of it, if you like, as three layers:  at the top, there
is the   presentation layer. For this slide it's defined by style sheet. And
in  the middle there's content, a funny word which seems to be  popular on the
Web nowadays.  This, the HTML code, which  says that this thing which in fact
the style sheet had turned yellow is a  first level heading, and this thing is
an unordered list.  And then underneath&mdash;there isn't a lot on this page I
would say would be  data. There's a metadata at the top which gives the
relationship  between this slide and the other slides. But the data are the
things like  the stock prices and who actually wrote this and when it was
created, and  what we think the weather is going to be like tomorrow in Boston
and things  like that.</p>

<p>I'm going to contrast these two sides a little bit. Because when we're
looking at the way forward and also when we're assessing how far we've got,
those are the two benchmarks.</p>

<p>How well are we doing? Are we doing human communication through shared
knowledge? Let's look through the  document side.  On this side the languages
are natural language. They're people talking  to people. So the language is
you just can't analyze them very well. And  this is the big problem on the net
for a lot of people, is the problem for  my mother and your mother and our
kids. They go out to search  engines and they ask a question and the search
engine gives these stupid answers. It has read a large proportion of the pages
on the entire Web (which is of course amazing)  but it doesn't understand any
of them &mdash; and it tries to answer the question on that basis.  Obviously
you get pretty unpredictable results.  However, the wonderful thing is that
when people communicate in this way, this  kind of fuzzy way, people can solve
problems intuitively. When people browse across the Web and see something
expressed in natural language, they think, "Aha!" and suddenly solve a totally
unrelated problem due to the incredible ability that the human brain has to
spot a pattern totally out of context by a huge amount of parallel
processing.</p>

<p>It's very important that we use this human intuitive ability because
everything else we can automate, but we're not very good at automatically
doing that. I  wanted the Web to be what I call an interactive space where
everybody can  edit. And I started saying "interactive," and then I read in
the media that the Web was great because it was "interactive," meaning you
could click. This was not what I meant by interactivity, so I started calling
it  "intercreativity". (I don't generally believe in making up words to solve
problems, so I'm sorry about this one.) What I mean is being creative with
others. A few fundamental rules make this possible.  As you can read, so you
should be able (given the authority) to write. If you can see  pictures on
your screen, why can't you take pictures and very easily and  intuitively put
them up there? You feel that you know how to use the Web?  Somebody yesterday
asked me, "What's the problem? The Web is so intuitive.  Hasn't it solved that
problem?" I asked,<br>
"Do you take digital  photographs?" <br>
"Yes"<br>
"So how long does it take you to get them on a Web page so the rest of the
family can see them?"<br>
"Oh, I wouldn't know how to do that."</p>

<p>We're certainly not there. At the moment I certainly cannot put the cursor
in the middle of this slide and correct a spelling mistake. So in fact there's
a huge amount we have to do.  One of the reasons this is difficult is that
it's actually hard. The research community produced group editors which would
allow you to  edit documents and share a document. And while two people are
working at  the same time&mdash;we know how to do that; we the academic
community.  But I don't have it here now. I can't edit this so that somebody
watching  this on a broadcast can see the edit at the same time.</p>

<p>So one of the reasons is that it's actually hard to get the software
working seriously, as a product. It also needs a whole lot of infrastructure.
We need a lot more stability. We need people to learn to stop changing URL's,
so links don't break. That's just a question often of hygiene and making an
organizational commitment, when you put something on the Web, to keeping  it
there.  But also, underneath, we need digital signature. We need digital
signature so that when you share things with your colleagues you know that
you're sharing it with your colleagues and you're not sharing it with just
anybody, any hacker who happened to turn up on that strip of Ethernet.  So if
you ask me what is the most important thing for us to do over the  next 35
years, that I would hope in the next five to ten years we can fix this. We can
fix this so that you can use the Web intuitively as the way that you express
an "aha!", a thought, the moment that you think of something. And I can fix
this slide the moment I realize it's got garbage on the bottom.</p>

<p>Now a look on the other side. The other side is very different.  Data has
very well-defined meaning. So typically a huge number of Web pages are
generated from databases.  The people who produce the databases may, when they
started it with a  little spreadsheet, have had a vague idea of what the
columns meant, but  by now have a very good idea of what the columns mean. The
database expresses  well-defined relationship between things in the columns.
When you had  a weather server to pick up the temperature in Massachusetts, in
fact  the person behind it knows that this is the temperature in degrees
Centigrade measured at seven o'clock in the morning at Logan Airport using
this little thermometer four feet above the ground by that little bench  that
you see on the television.  So there is well-defined data and there are
well-defined things you do  with it. When you write a digital check a fairly
well-defined thing has  got to happen. And when you look at your bank
statement after having written the check and the check having even been
cashed, there's got to be a very simple logical relationship between those
things. You don't generally send pieces of poetry, which should give the bank
a feel for the amount of money to pay to the payee.</p>

<p>At the moment there's a very strange phenomenon going on. The data is being
exported as Web pages. There are programs which want to process that data, who
want to, for example, analyze the stock prices, who want to look at all the
bookstores and find out where you can get that book cheapest and then present
you with a comparative shopping list&mdash;and there are lots of Web sites out
there. If you're not using one, do:  you could save yourself some money.
What's happening is that they are often going out to a Web site which may or
may not  be cooperative: it may just be putting that information on the Web.
Sometimes the Web sites that they are scraping for data, would not cooperate
if asked to. But the data is out there; it's available. And so  you have one
program which is turning it from data into documents, and  another program
which is taking the document and trying to figure out where  in that mass of
glowing flashing things is the price of the book. It  picks it out from the
third row of the second column of the third table in  the page. And then when
something changes suddenly you get the ISBN  number instead of the price of a
book and you have a problem.  This process is called "screen scraping," and is
clearly ridiculous,  and the fact that everybody is doing it shows to me that
there is a very  very clear demand for actually shipping the data as data. So
that if  somebody wants to do an SQL query, if somebody wants to query an
object out  here, they don't have to go through this whole simulation of a
very simple  query in order to actually get at the data.</p>

<p>The idea of "the semantic Web" is the side of the Web where data has
meaning. What's meaning? I'm not  suggesting that you should program your
computer to understand the meaning  of life right now. I am using meaning in
the sense that either there is a program which knows somehow how to pay a
check and  therefore can just process a check, or somebody has to find a
relationship  between what the documents, the checks, call price and what this
catalog  calls price. So there has been a link made between the meaning of one
column and the meaning of another. So meaning in general on the semantic  Web
is defined relatively. Just like in a dictionary.</p>

<p>Don't panic. I'm  not becoming relativist about my morals. I'm just
pointing out that all definitions that we use at the moment are relative to
other definitions and so on just as in a dictionary. One of the things which
we are doing now is we are moving to a state when  all documents will be self
defining, self describing. So with the top of a  document which uses all kinds
of tags like price and shoe size there will  be a URL of the document that
defines exactly what shoe  size means in this context.  We won't have remove
this ambiguity which happened when we extended HTML and  started putting cool
things like tables into HTML. People who were around in those days will
rememeber how the word spread that it would be really nice to  have tables in
HTML: you couldn't put a table in a Web page before that.  But everybody
started doing it at once and when anyone started a table they marked up in the
HTML code with "<code>&lt;TABLE>"</code>. So when you read "&lt;TABLE>"  you
had no  idea what sort of markup was coming in. And  that lasted until we
organized a global meeting of all the people involved  to agree on it.</p>

<p>Now, we can't&mdash;every time somebody wants to think of a new idea, a new
term, a new column in a database&mdash;have a global meeting to decide about
it. We have to let people invent new terms all the time as they do anyway, but
just make sure there's no ambiguity.  Also we have to allow people to combine
more than one vocabulary in the  document. We don't just want to make
something which works; we want to  make something which can evolve. This is
very important from the point of  view of the World Wide Web Consortium
cutting itself out of the loop as  much as possible.</p>

<p>We have 320 members, various types&mdash;companies, organizations,
individuals&mdash;all coming together to discuss global status. and we can't
do that when you want to invent languages for pharmaceuticals, languages  for
whatever your favorite new database application may be.  What we need to be
able to do is to be able to send documents around which  use standard
vocabulary, and add extensions in in a well-defined way; which mix in the
extensions, so that somebody who understands the standards but  doesn't an
extension can figure out whether this is a problem. And in the case  that the
data is in fact just informational data on the side, can process the rest.
This in fact allows us to move from using one vocabulary to another
vocabulary.</p>

<p>This partial understanding sounds like a failure. But in fact partial
understanding is what allows us to actually function in the world. If you
think of an invoice, if you send an invoice from one company to another,  when
it's paid, the person who allows that to be paid and sends the check  off,
checks various fields on that invoice and checks that it's been  authorized an
appropriate person. They check the amount, but when they  look at the parts
they don't have to understand exactly what a "lower  left-hand engine bearing
cover bolt  bracket"  is, because that part of the document is in fact
completely ignorable  for purposes of paying the invoice.  A huge amount of
information, stuff we read, everything that runs our  business, is like that.
There are documents going around in which  different people understand
different parts. And that is how we can extend  the language. And that is how
we can evolve the whole of society that uses  this language. If we're going to
be moving to the semantic Web we have  to be able to do that.</p>

<p>We've talked a lot during this fest about digital signature. And, of
course, digital signature, if we were only allowed to do it, would be
fundamental to this. And it will be fundamental to this. We have, in  fact,
directly following this on Thursday and Friday, at the Consortium, a workshop
about signing XML, the basic language for data, with digital
signatures.Digital signature on top of the semantic Web turns it into a Web of
trust in which a computer can not only reason and make deductions, using not
only the logic of it, but also the model of trust.  I  could also talk to you
about this for six hours, but I won't.</p>

<p>Let's look about what happens as we scale these things up. Remember the
human side that when the Web was difficult to sell not only because looking at
two hypertext pages wasn't sufficient to make people  very excited, but also
there was a certain fear that the Web would break  structures. There was a lot
of people I spoke to initially wanted the Web  to be hierarchical because they
wanted the hierarchical feeling of control. Or they decided the  best
documentation system for them was a matrix. In fact the Web broke out  of the
box and allowed you to express a hierarchy or a matrix equally well, but it
allowed you to express other things, too, which was a little bit frightening.
It's been a dramatic change for the individual. I am, of course,  very
interested in whether it can be a dramatic change for society. And  I've got a
feeling that I could talk for two hours about most of these  points.</p>

<p>A really exciting thing would be if we could scale that ability to make
intuitive leaps. I've always wanted to be able to do this with a group, of
very bright, very enthusiastic people really interested in specific
overlapping areas, say LCS, or all the people who are trying to find a cure
for AIDS, or whatever. A typical thing researcher tries to do is to get as
much into his or her head  at once and then hope that the solution forms, the
penny drops, that  connection is made, and they can write it down before they
go to sleep.  How can you get a group of people to do the same thing? Maybe if
we  can use the Web as a very low bandwidth ineffective small set of neural
connections which connect the people. Imagine that one person surfing the Web
can  leave a trail.  In other words, if somebody, as they're surfing the Web
and they notice an interesting association and connection can represent that
with a link, then another person surfing the  Web on another topic maybe find
that link and use it and as a result bring  a new communal path a little bit
further on. And so the group as a whole after a  while will be able to make
that "Aha!". That's something I would find very  exciting.</p>

<p>On the other side, promoting the machine communication is running across
all  the same hopes and fears as promoting the human communication. The same
problems that&mdash;when suggesting this to somebody, it's very difficult to
explain how if you, instead of just putting a database on the Web you put  it
on in a way that everything has a URL and it's part of a Web&mdash;that when
all the databases are linked together, and when there are links
meaning&mdash;when there are links between the meaning of this column and the
meaning, well, that's not very exciting when I just described it as, you know,
the last name in this is the same as the last name in this. But  imagine that
all the last name columns in all the databases on the Web were  all directly
or indirectly linked together by links. Then effectively you'd be able to join
any databases that talk about the last name of a  person on that together.
You'd be able to query the whole Web as all the  data on Web is one huge
database. Which would be very very powerful, and  I'm glad we talked about
privacy yesterday.  So the same rules have to apply. Anything can refer to
anything. Wherever there was an identifier in your data language suddenly you
have to  be able to use a URI, and there's a certain amount of resistance to
that.  Because people want to maintain the fact that the systems are
predictable.  They don't want the language to become too expressive, because
computer  science is all about&mdash;this is perhaps a little unfair&mdash;the
art of designing  languages which are sufficiently constraining so that you
can only write solvable problems in them. If you look at a particular query or
you  look at the language of writing what you can ask an ATM to do it's very
simple, because an ATM can only do a few things.  But when you link together
all the data you end up with a representation  of the world, and the world is
a very complex place, and you need an  arbitrarily expressive language for
expressing that.</p>

<p>We end up with  this tension between that and systems which we will be
producing which will be predictable, like checks. We will have to constrain
the checks so that  you can only put an integer in there. You cannot put an
expression, say  that this is "pay the bearer on demand the smallest number
expresseable in two distinct ways as the sum of two cubes", or something which
Ron will cook up you can only calculate it in 35 years. People want that check
to terminate. They want the payment to happen in a finite time. They're very
worried when we suggest that the underlying structure for this  will be very
expressive.  But in fact, when you put all these systems together, the result
will be  all the independent machines &mdash; Michael's bulldozers&mdash;
taken together will be a huge very very complex map of the world.</p>

<p>I used to say that the Web would mimic the world. In fact, it ends up being
the world to a certain extent. So the well be on their heuristics, we will not
have to use heuristics, don't panic, in order to pay checks. But it  will be a
very exciting place to explore algorithms which break what we  call the closed
world assumption of the people who try to export things in  boxes without any
breathing holes.  Of course, the really exciting thing happens when we mix the
two worlds.  I don't know we can solve any serious problems unless we do. I'm
not  asking for the machines to join the human world with artificial
intelligence. I'm happy for other people to ask for that. But I'm just  saying
that if we as humans, when we have gone already to the trouble of putting data
into databases, putting our schedules, our appointments into a schedule
database&mdash;we've already in other cases done that; it's in a very
well-defined form. Let's not lose that information. Let's not lose that
semantics. Let's use it. Let's digitally sign it. Let's allow machines  to
start operating on it. And with this mixture of predictable mechanisms  of
heuristics I think it should be very exciting.   For me the fundamental Web is
the Web of people. It's not the Web of  machines talking to each other; it's
not the network of machines talking to  each other. It's not the Web of
documents. Remember when machines talked  to each other over some protocol,
two machines are talking on behalf of two  people. The Consortium has a whole
technical domain  "Technology and Society"  which recognizes that,  at the end
of the day, if we're not doing something for the Web of People, then we're
really not doing something useful at all.</p>

<p>Originally it was social need that drove me to make the Web in the first
place. In the future one of the exciting things is finding what I call social
machines. We know about working groups and we know about  social voting
structures and we know about all sorts of social systems, and  a lot of people
are very excited about what sort of new social systems we  can make on the
Web, which maybe can be run by little machines; things that  you can log onto
and become part of and progress, just as we progress documents along
standardization tracks, as we endorse things.  We can  invent new forms which
maybe will allow us to exploit the fact that  we don't have geographical
boundaries anymore.  I'm very interested in a more fractal, less hierarchical
structure arising in society, allowing us to operate using the web of trust.
Perhaps we  can, now that we've got machines that can help us find out
individually  where we best fit, how we can weave ourselves  into the Web to
contribute best to society. Maybe we can continue another  very small step
along that path that we started when we stopped (some of us, most of the time)
using violence to settle or to decide things, and moved on to using money, or
in some cases  stopped using money and started actually thinking about what
other  people were feeling and trying to do, and sharing their goals.  Maybe
we can find new systems based on peer respect, in which we work together and
appreciate that we are all in fact trying to go in  the same direction. To me
that would be very exciting and make the whole  thing worthwhile. Thank you
very much for your attention.</p>

<p>[Applause.]</p>

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