Web Inventor Honored

The man credited with inventing the World Wide Wide, Sir Timothy J. Berners-Lee, urged leaders of academic, private, and governmental organizations to recognize and reap the benefits of the open culture of the digital world at an event at the Harvard Kennedy School yesterday evening.

Berners-Lee received the third annual Pathfinder Award from the Kennedy School’s Leadership for a Networked World program, which aims to educate leaders about changes driven by the digitalization of information. The award recognizes individuals who have made innovations in government through technology.

“The government’s challenges have been fundamentally influenced by the World Wide Web,” said Jerry E. Mechling ’65, director of the Networked World program, about the organization’s decision to chose a technology researcher rather than a politician for the first time.

In his speech last night, Berners-Lee said that the Internet has broken down boundaries and created a culture that uses shared space.

“We’re making standards for a world in which people use the Web to communicate,” said Berners-Lee, who now serves as the director of the World Wide Web Consortium. “When they use the Web to communicate, they’re in a world of overlapping cultures, overlapping communities.”

Berners-Lee said that one of his hopes for the future of the Internet is the semantic Web—an evolution of the World Wide Web in which different types of data can be integrated and easily accessed. As an example, Berners-Lee said that this system could allow users to determine the most efficient way to buy a cup of coffee, visit friends, and return to their hotel room with a single query, instead of searching for the three items separately.

To realize such a vision, individual organizations must be willing to release their data for public use, requiring great courage and initiative, according to Berners-Lee.

“It’s common in an organization for people to feel protective about their data,” he said. “The leadership that is required to change the ethos, the fear that happens about letting go of the data, is huge,”

But when an audience member questioned the potential dangers of bringing more data into the public domain, Berners-Lee replied that it would be necessary to ensure that new technology does not violate personal privacy.

“We want the technology to be the Lego for a nice world, a world we want to live in,” he said.

—Staff writer Athena Y. Jiang can be reached at ajiang@fas.harvard.edu.