Web father works on Killer App

HIS HONOUR Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide wibble, says he is having trouble touting the idea of the Semantic Web which is being touted as Web part two.

Speaking in an interview to the Sydney Morning Herald, Sir Tim said the Semantic Web is proving a hard concept to sell because people were "thinking too small".

He said that he had started to put applications onto the Semantic Web one by one and linking them up when and where it seems useful. People are slow to back the idea.

Sir Tim reckons that once it gets to a critical mass where everything starts getting linked into an unimaginably large whole, it will grow in value and people will start to respect the concept.

The big idea behind the Semantic Web is that there is a lot of information in databases, spreadsheets, and websites that you can read but not manipulate. He said that despite his excitement about the future, he is concerned that poorly conceived changes to the web's organisation and governance could compromise its functionality and "universality".

The project has been 15 years in the making.

The thing is part of Sir Tim's grand vision of "a single web of meaning, about everything and for everyone".

It took a while for the web to be take seriously too, so the Knight of the Realm isn't too fashed before it comes to pass. The full interview can be found here.

A set of questions and answers (SQA) about the Semantic Web can be found here, there and everywhere. Semiotics. We've heard of it. µ