JISC

The World Wide Web is in the ‘embryonic stages of its development’ and ‘there’s a huge amount of change to come’. So said Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the Web, in an opening speech at the International World Wide Web conference in Edinburgh yesterday.

Comparing the Web to other inventions, Sir Tim claimed that the Web was different, in that while inventions such as the car or the television continued to develop, their development proceeded within relatively narrow limits. The Web, on the other hand, reinvented itself, he said, ‘because it is nature, it’s active space.’

Later, speaking to reporters at the conference for key decision-makers and technologists, he said that attempts by some commercial interests, particularly in the USA, to promote a two-tiered Web should be resisted. ‘The wonder, power and diversity of the Web,’ he said, ‘will always beat any attempt to fragment it.’ It should remain a ‘diverse space,’ he continued. Its role as ‘an unbiased medium’ is, ‘he said, ‘very important for society.’

The development and adoption of open standards is important to this commitment to diversity, Sir Tim claimed. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), of which he is the director, is working on the standards which will allow the mobile web to become more widely used, in a variety of different ways and across a range of platforms. Along with the development of the Semantic Web – the attempt to allow computers to ‘understand’ information rather than simply display it – the mobile web was an issue which the conference in Edinburgh would, he said, take further forward. ‘We need a conference like this,’ he concluded, ‘because all these things are interconnected.’

Earlier, Scottish First Minister Jack McConnell had opened the conference, welcoming ‘many of the greatest minds and computer experts’ to Edinburgh, saying the conference would be ‘one of the premier technology events of 2006’.

Giving the keynote address, Sir David Brown, Chair of Motorola, spoke of the ‘new economy’ the web had been instrumental in bringing about, the ‘extraordinary power’ of mobile technologies which, he claimed, we have hardly begun to tap and their potential to bridge the digital divide. ‘The small can become global,‘ he said, disrupting traditional models of delivery and providing personalised content in which continuity of experience for users was paramount.
The conference – of which JISC is a silver sponsor – continued in the afternoon with a range of panel sessions, including one on the impact of the Web on publishing. Tim Faircliffe of Reuters spoke of the ‘dissipation’ of information on the Web, a dissipation which, however, led to an increase in the authenticity of web-based news, while Nick Baker of publisher Elsevier echoed earlier comments about the increased opportunities which the Web presented and the accelerating demand for online services which his company had striven to meet.

Presenting an alternative view of the Web and its possibilities, Richard Smith, Chief Executive of BMJ Publishing Group, argued that all medical research should be openly availably to all, in contrast to the online content provided by commercial publishers such as Elsevier. The present system, he claimed ‘is inadequate’ as the results of publicly-funded medical trials are not openly available, something which ‘threatens public safety’. ‘We are still at the beginning of what we can do to make medical and scientific research available,’ he said, concluding: ‘The real innovation is still to come.’

The International World Wide Web conference continues until Friday the 26th.

For further information please go to: WWW2006