The Psychology of Web Design

Tim Berners-Lee

Power to the user: The man credited with inventing the internet gives exclusive insight into his predictions of a Semantic Web

The rise of the Web 2.0 generation of sites has meant a massive growth in the amount of data being stored on servers worldwide. However, that data is designed to be read by people as opposed to machines. Tim Berners- Lee believes the way forward is to allow that content to be accessible by both, using descriptive technologies such as the resource description framework (RDF). Way back at the end of the Twentieth Century – before the onset of Web 2.0 – he wrote, “I have a dream for the web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data – the content, links and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialise.” Nine years have passed since his prediction, and the Semantic Web increasingly looks likely. We asked him how he envisions the web in the not-so-distant future. “Web 2.0 has created justified excitement over the ability to mash up data from different sources. But many Web 2.0 sites lock in user data, and as a result users are starting to ask for their data back. Recent interest in social networking APIs is a clear signal that people want to exercise greater control over their data and to do more with it. For example, suppose I subscribe to two independent services: a social network where I converse with fellow avid gardeners and a photo-sharing site. My goal is to create a photo album of my fellow gardeners. I happen to keep track of who is in the photos in a private database. To create the album, I need to merge three sources of data. I want to keep the two online services unaware of each other, both for privacy reasons and because I may switch to a different photo-sharing site and want to be able to do so without constraint. To create my album, I use an application that runs on my local machine (say, in my browser). This can access my private data as well as online sources. The application uses Semantic Web technology to fetch and merge the information: SPARQL for the queries and RDF for the data representation. As my online group of friends and my set of photos evolve, so does my dynamic album. I find that once you catch a glimpse of all you can learn from just a few sources of data, it becomes very exciting and you never want to give up your data again. It will be very exciting to see how people run with the Semantic Web and what they discover.”

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