confused of calcutta

I was reading the New Scientist over the weekend, and came across this interview with Tim Berners-Lee. [My apologies, but unless you have a subscription the magazine won’t let you get past the article stub].

I’ll paraphrase what the interview said; any and all errors and misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. Where I have quoted directly from the article, this has been made clear.

• Web was about putting documents and images online; semantic web is about putting data online.
• We can publish articles and papers now, but not the underlying data. We need the data.
• To publish this data we need a mark-up language for data. So we created RDF.
• RDF lets you put data on the web and make connections so we have one big database.
• When we free this data magical things can and will happen.
• Some get the power of this; many don’t; the life sciences guys are good at getting it.
• Privacy and data protection are issues, but nowhere near as much as people make out
• Web did not fulfil potential for showing the “how”, stayed on the “what”
• As HTML became a truly powerful presentation medium, looking improved and editing died
• Blogs and wikis are helping change that, though we have much to learn about social software
• “We have to learn about how people like to make groups and learn about the social systems involved in collaborations as well as the technical side of things”
• “The internet was designed not to care what was done with it. It just moved packets of information from one place to another: the fundamental properties that make the internet work could not be held to ransom”
• “The internet is all about division between layers”
• “The web tries not to prefer one sort of information over another”
• “The web needs to be the way it is to work”
• “Before the web, and even now, a lot of the systems were being designed to be completely consistent. The way we’ve traditionally done that is to make top-down hierarchical systems, whether in organisations or in programming. This has always been considered a good thing. The maxims of top-down, structured programming are “information-hiding” so that modules don’t see into each other but are black boxes tied together at the edges.
• “The maxim of the web, however, is if you have something important, give it a label and then people will link to it.
• “….by trying to constrain ourselves to use hierarchical systems, we’ve reached the limit of scale”

Lots of good stuff. More later.