Berners-Lee, Tim

Berners-Lee, Tim

(1955–  ) British

Computer Scientist

A graduate of Oxford University, Tim Berners-Lee created what would become the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the giant European physics research institute. At CERN, he struggled with organizing the doz-ens of incompatible computer systems and software that had been brought to the labs by thousands of scientists from around the world. With existing systems each requir-ing a specialized access procedure, researchers had little hope of finding out what their colleagues were doing or of learning about existing software tools that might solve their problems.

Berners-Lee’s solution was to bypass traditional data-base systems and to consider text on all systems as “pages” that would each have a unique address, a universal docu-ment identifier (later known as a uniform resource locator, or URL). He and his assistants used existing ideas of hyper-text to link words and phrases on one page to another page (see hypertext and hypermedia), and adapted existing hypertext editing software for the NeXT computer to create the first World Wide Web pages, a server to provide access to the pages and a simple browser, a program that could be used to read pages and follow the links as the reader desired (see Web server and Web browser). But while existing hypertext systems were confined to browsing a single file or at most, the contents of a single computer system, Bern-ers-Lee’s World Wide Web used the emerging Internet to provide nearly universal access.

Between 1990 and 1993, word of the Web spread throughout the academic community as Web software was written for more computer platforms (see World Wide Web). As demand grew for a body to standardize and shape the evolution of the Web, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994 and continues as its director. Together with his colleagues, he has struggled to maintain a coherent vision of the Web in the face of tre-mendous growth and commercialization, the involvement of huge corporations with conflicting agendas, and conten-tious issues of censorship and privacy. His general approach has been to develop tools that would empower the user to make the ultimate decision about the information he or she would see or divulge.

Berners-Lee now works as a senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In his original vision for the Web, users would create Web pages as easily as they could read them, using software no more complicated than a word processor. While there are programs today that hide the details of HTML coding and allow easier Web page cre-ation, Berners-Lee feels the Web must become even easier to use if it is to be a truly interactive, open-ended knowledge system. He is also interested in developing software that can take better advantage of the rich variety of information on the Web, creating a “semantic” Web of meaningful con-nections that would allow for logical analysis and permit human beings and machines not merely to connect, but to actively collaborate (see semantic Web and xml).

In the debate over a possible tiered Internet service (see Internet access policy) Berners-Lee has spoken out for “net neutrality,” the idea that priority given to material passing over the Internet should not depend on its content or origin. He describes equal treatment to be a fundamental democratic principle, given the primacy of the Net today.

Berners-Lee has garnered numerous awards and honor-ary degrees. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire, and in 2001 he became a Fellow of the British Royal Society. Berners-Lee also received the Japan Prize in 2002 and in that same year shared the Asturias Award with fel-low Internet pioneers Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn, and Vinton Cerf. In 2007 Berners-Lee received the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.a