Here we are in a big ballroom at the Fairmont Banff Springs for Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s opening keynote at the 2007 World Wide Web Conference. Outside, the sun is shining, and the mountains look stunning. There are, of course, no windows in this room.

With the compulsory ‘Welcoming Remarks’ out of the way, W3C Director and ‘Father of the Web’ Tim Berners-Lee takes to the stage to deliver his keynote.

16th web conference

Conference has been through a phase when it wasn’t sure what it was; trade show/ academic conference ?

Web hasn’t been ‘core computer science’

What it is we do…

Philosophical engineering? Looking at the world, and inventing a mathematics to represent that world.

Things like the web work because of social rules as well as technical rules. Social conventions apply on the web.

The difference in the Web conference as opposed to more detailed technical conferences, is that ideas can move from micro to macro; they can become emergent phenomena. This requires an understanding of the social effects behind such things as incentives to participate…

Importantly, too, individuals have the capability to take ideas, to work with them, and to link them with the ideas of others, rapidly and globally.

“The web took off, because early implementors got a benefit from being there”; the kudos of being read, and time saved by pointing users to a single source of ideas, rather than having them come back in person all the time.

“The Semantic Web is a reaction to the lack of machine-processable data connections between documents on the web.” And there is an accompanying social contract around the use of de-referenceable URIs, etc.

“Data isn’t like the Web”.

“The value add of the Web is unexpected - serendipitous - reuse”

“As the web becomes a dominant part of the way people communicate, we are constructing an infrastructure to enable humanity to do what it does, and that needs to be done with respect” - privacy, security, transparency, trust etc.

Update: Post edited to replace standard TBL shot with a photo from the day, by my colleague Rob Styles.

Technorati Tags: RDF, Semantic Web, Talis, Tim Berners-Lee, WWW2007

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