September 29th, 2004
Berners-Lee, Metcalfe kick off MIT tech conference
Kicking off the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Emerging Technologies Conference this morning was World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web, knighted at Buckingham palace last year) as the lead-off speaker and Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe as the master of ceremonies. Seeing these two together on stage reminded me that almost all network traffic takes place over at least one, if not both, of these two men’s inventions.
As expected, Berners-Lee covered his favorite topic, the Semantic Web. His entire slide show is already online. One of the Semantic Web’s major selling propositions is taking the connectivity we see on today’s Web, at the content level (hyperlinking relevant text to relevant text), and automatically generating that linkage at the data level. Using technologies like the W3C’s Resource Description Framework specification and taxonomies like those which Gartner is urging IT managers to take a closer look at, Berners-Lee believes that bits of data can be connected with other bits of data, regardless of the type of database that data resides in. My prediction? If Berners-Lee delivers the Semantic Web and it works, then proprietary data-linkage technologies such as that which Microsoft has said will be a part of its forthcoming database-driven WinFS file system will give way to his standard approach. In other words, RDF may not only kill proprietary file systems, but arcane database query technologies as well.
Berners-Lee also expressed dissatisfaction (see his slide on this) with the direction that patents have taken and the difficulties they pose to standardization activities. Berners-Lee is no stranger to patent controversy. As Web services standards such as SOAP and WSDL were coming to fruition in 2002, the W3C was caught in the middle of an intellectual property maelstrom involving IBM, Microsoft, HP, Apple, and other W3C members. Late last year, the W3C was also instrumental in the invalidation of Eolas’ patent on browser plug-in technologies — a patent that threatened to force most browser developers (Microsoft, Mozilla.org, etc.) back to the drawing board. After the session, Metcalfe supplied the best description of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that I’ve heard to date: "a litigation engine."
