Tim Berners-Lee

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Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee (London, England, June 8, 1955) is a British computer scientist, known for being the father of the World Wide Web. He established the first communication between a client and a server using the HTTP protocol in December 1990. In October 1994 he founded the MIT-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to oversee and standardize the development of technologies over the foundations of the Web and that allow the functioning of the Internet.

Faced with the need to distribute and exchange information about his research more effectively, Berners-Lee developed the fundamental ideas that structure the web. He and his group created what is called the HTML Language (HyperText Markup Language) or hypertext markup language, the HTTP protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and the URL web object location system (Uniform Resource Locator).

You can find many of the ideas embodied by Berners-Lee in the Xanadu project (proposed by Ted Nelson) and the memex (by Vannevar Bush).

Biography

Tim Berners-Lee in 2005.

Tim Berners-Lee was born in South West London, United Kingdom, on June 8, 1955. His parents were Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents were British mathematicians and were part of the team that built the Manchester Mark I[citation needed]. For this reason, his professional orientation came from the family, since his parents had met in the development project of the Ferranti Mark I, the first commercial computer with a stored program developed by the Ferranti company in March 1951.

He started at Sheen Mont Primary School and then went on to Emanuel School, both in London, from 1969 to 1973. He studied at Queen's College, Oxford University, from 1973 to 1976, where he received a BA Physics first class. He met his first wife around this time. In 1978, he worked at D.G. Nash Limited (also in Poole) where he wrote an operating system.

Developing your career

Berners-Lee used this NeXTcube on the CERN, and it was the first web server in the world.

Berners-Lee worked at CERN from June to December 1980. During this time, he proposed a project based on hypertext to facilitate the sharing and updating of information among researchers. In this period he also built a program called ENQUIRE that never saw the light of day.

After leaving CERN in 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd., but returned to CERN again in 1984.

In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to unite the Internet and hypertext (HTTP and HTML), from which the World Wide Web would emerge. He developed his first proposal for the Web on March 12, 1989, but it did not have much success, so in 1990 and with the help of Robert Cailliau, they made a revision that was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall. He used ideas similar to those he had used in the Enquire system, to create the World Wide Web, for this he designed and built the first browser (called WorldWideWeb and developed with NEXTSTEP) and the first Web server which he called httpd (HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon).).

The first Web server was at CERN and was brought online on August 6, 1991. This provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, how one could have a browser, and how to set up a Web server. This was also the world's first Web directory, as Berners-Lee maintained a list of Web sites other than his own. Because both the server and client software were released for free from CERN, the heart of the European Internet at the time, their diffusion was very fast. The number of Web servers went from twenty-six in 1992 to two hundred in October 1995, which reflects the speed of Internet diffusion.

In 1994 he entered the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He moved to the US and started the W3C, which he currently heads. The W3C is an international standardization body for Web technologies run jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the French ERCIM, and Keiō University in Japan. This body decided that all its standards were free, that is, that everyone could use them freely at no cost, which was undoubtedly one of the great reasons why the Web has become as important as it is today. in day.

In her book Weaving the Web, published in 1999, Berners-Lee explains why web technology is open and free. He considers himself both the inventor and the protector of the web[citation required].

Berners-Lee was one of the pioneers in favor of net neutrality.

Current projects

Berner-Lee's foreground in January 2010.

Tim Berners-Lee was critical of the expectations generated around Web 2.0 when he argued about this platform that "if Web 1.0 connected computers, Web 2.0 connects people." Tim believes that it is not a new generation of the web but a different way and, yes, much more capable of deploying applications on the same web platform invented by him. In this sense, tools such as Wikipedias or blogs are tools that encourage and enhance participation and collaboration, but, in fact, there is no basic technological component that had not existed for many years before.

Berners-Lee developed the concept of intercreativity considered a vital aspect of the future of the web and which he defined as:

The process of doing things or solving problems together. [...] we have to be able not only to find any kind of document on the web, but also to create any kind of document, easily [...] We would have to be able not only to interact with other people, but to create with other people.
[Berners-Lee 1999]

Since 2001, Tim Berners-Lee has been working on the Semantic Web project, which aims to create a universal medium for the exchange of meaningful (semantic) information, in a machine-understandable form, from the content of web pages. web documents. This is intended to expand the interoperability of computer systems and reduce the mediation of human operators in intelligent information flow processes. The very conception of the web as a universal means of presentation had the orientation of being interpretable by humans and, therefore, it has a visual orientation. This aspect reduces the capacity for the exchange of information between machines, reducing the possibilities of access to information in a systematic and industrialized way.

Berners-Lee is the president of the Open Data Institute, which he co-founded with Nigel Shadbolt in 2012.

See also: Semantic Web

5-star development plan for Open Data (open data). Five-step scheme.
1 star - make your material available on the web (any format) under an open license
2 stars - available as structured data (e.g. Excel instead of scanning the image of a table)
3 stars - available in an unpainted open format (e.g. CSV instead of Excel)
4 stars - use the URI to refer to things in their data, so that people can refer to them
5 stars - link your data to other data to provide a context (LOD / Linked Open Data). "Linked Data".

Domain name controversy

In the past, Berners-Lee has opposed the creation of new domain names such as '.mobi'. In fact, when the '.mobi ' was born, he was one of his detractors. He argued that everyone should access the same websites, regardless of whether they used a computer or a mobile. Basically what Berners-Lee did not like about the & # 39;. mobi & # 39; is that this would be to be accessed only with mobile phones, since he developed the web as a form of universal communication and did not see the need for the development of '.mobi' For mobile use only.

There was also a fight between different governments and ICANN over the ownership of domain names, especially with ".com". Berners-Lee supports domain names being owned by no one but a public resource.[citation needed] Berners-Lee also made it clear that domain name or ownership was not the most important aspect in the standardization process, video standards, encoding, open data communication standards, scientific data uploading were more important. and clinical data or the spread of information between countries.[citation needed]

Posts

Berners-Lee has published scientific articles in the most prestigious journals such as Nature or Scientific American. Two books stand out:

Other important publications:

Acknowledgments