The Ultimate Webmaster

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Tim Berners-Lee, the man who After developing the initial proposal for gave away the Web, talks about the Web in March 1989, writing code for the how it is changing business. first Web server and combination browser/HTML editor in 1990, introducing By Scott Kirsner the Web to CERN (the European Particle [Image] Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland) in December of that year, making it available on the Internet in the summer of 1991, and refining the specs for URLs, HTTP and HTML, Tim Berners-Lee landed at MIT in 1994. As director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Berners-Lee helps coordinate the activities of the 150 companies that constitute the W3C-fast-moving companies like Netscape Communications, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Open Market, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems-to ensure that the software standards that serve as the Web's Finding it Online foundation remain open and nonproprietary.

Andersen Consulting WM: It seems like a huge number of (http://www.ac.com) companies have started to realize that the Web and its protocols are a great way to The Boston Globe share information internally. Do you see (http://www.globe.com) that happening?

Hewlett-Packard Berners-Lee: I get that question a lot: (http://www.hp.com) "What about the intranet? Don't you think this is really exciting?" Which is sort of Netscape Communications a waking up to the fact, which has always (http://www.netscape.com) been the case, that most of the World Wide Web has always been used within groups, Microsoft Corp. within companies. So the companies that win (http://www.microsoft.com) are the ones that learn how to use the Web at every level: for public relations, for Open Market internal discussions and for keeping track (http://www.openmarket.com) of the silly decisions we make day-to-day, which sometimes, if you're going to reverse Silicon Graphics a decision, are very interesting. (http://www.sgi.com/ ss.home.javafree.html) WM: In terms of the more advanced stuff on the Web-especially agent technology, like Sun Microsystems the music recommendation site that came out (http://www.sun.com) of the [MIT] Media Lab and the BargainFinder site that Andersen Consulting World Wide Web Consortium developed-what do you see as the potential (http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/) with those sorts of things? Berners-Lee: I think those are very interesting. I think agents are going to eventually make life more manageable, and be very powerful. I think the things people are doing with collaborative filtering, for example, are interesting. Using the combination of people and machines well is going to be an art. And our long-term push is to get information and machinery to a point where someone can make assertions and say, "I disagree with that document" or "I certify that this document is true" or "I certify that this person owns this house"-things that will allow you to actually verify things. For example, when you buy a house, typically in a lot of countries it involves a title search through all the deeds. The deeds are stored in land registries, and it takes lawyers a long time to go through them. And it's not only the deeds, but you have to do a search for any acts of transfer of land. If all this stuff were on the Web, and if it were in machine-readable form, you'd just be able to ask, "Is this person in this state going to be able to sell this house?"

WM: How do you see that sort of technology being applied to intranets or corporate networks in terms of decision making and communication inside a company?

Berners-Lee: One of the earliest proposals back in the pre-Web days was that one of the exciting things about getting everybody to live in a virtual world-to put their information into an information space-is that you can then use computers to analyze it. So within a corporation, there are a lot of exciting tools you can use, all sorts of forms of meeting and communication that you may never have thought of before. And also there'll be the fact that you'll be able to use computers to go and have a look at it. Can you imagine saying, "Here's our organization. Here's its home page. Now off you go, my little agent. Go and tell me what you think." And it may come back and say, "Well, pretty good organization. I can see you have a set of products here, and you have some documentation for them. And there are a few funny things. We've got a module over here that's been written by somebody that's not used by anybody at all. We've got one product over here that so far as I can tell is identical to this product over here, which is made by your Australian division. You know, that one is selling and this one isn't. Also, I've looked at the topology of your R&D department, and, just looking at it from a long distance, it has a certain property to it. The ratio between the valency of the individual people and the diameter of the division itself and the overall connectivity I've compared with a Fortune 500 company over the last 10 years is very worrying. This looks like a division that isn't working very well. Because I've looked at your knowledge space, and the people are just not connected together properly. You should suggest that this person looks at that, and you should suggest that this marketing team look at that product, and you should look at this manager and find out who on earth he's reporting to."

WM: Do you see these kinds of developments as a five-year thing, a 10-year thing or something so incremental that you couldn't really keep track of them?

Berners-Lee: Well, go back to when electricity was invented. Where would you think new uses for electricity would stop being developed? It's just going to be layer upon layer. Hopefully, in a few years, people will stop talking about the Web as an application, and they'll be talking about the Web like they talk about air and water. It'll just be something you take for granted. It's information space. And exciting things will be happening within that space.

Scott Kirsner is lead content developer at Boston.com. He can be reached at kirsner@globe.com. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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