Internet Pioneer to Chart Web’s Next Leap

Internet Pioneer to Chart Web’s Next Leap – ScienceInsider.

Tim Berners-Lee, the non-Al Gore inventor of the World Wide Web, is teaming up with Web science expert Nigel Shadbolt of the University of Southampton, Highfield, in the United Kingdom to create the Institute of Web Science, an organization dedicated to helping the United Kingdom extract maximum benefit from the arrival of Web 3.0. The project was kick startedtoday with 30 million ($45 million) from the U.K. government.

Web 3.0, or the “semantic web” as Berners-Lee prefers to call it, is based on the idea that computers will not only be able to retrieve information from the World Wide Web but to understand it as well, or at least to put information in context, thus ensuring that the results of a search are most likely to be the ones you want.

Computer scientist Michael Foreman of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom says this ability to put information in context has the potential to help scientists all over the world work together on a project. “At present,” he says, “the amount of new data produced in the world is doubling roughly every 18 months—approximately the rate at which our computational power is increasing or even slightly faster.

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