Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he had something bigger in mind all along. He tells TR how his 15 years of work on the "Semantic Web" are finally paying off.
Creating the world wide web didn't make Tim Berners-Lee instantly rich or famous. In part, that's because the Web sprang from relatively humble technologies. Berners-Lee's invention was based on an information retrieval program called Enquire (named after a Victorian book, Enquire Within upon Everything), which he wrote in 1980 as a contract programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. In part, it's because Berners-Lee did the unthinkable when, more than a decade later, he finished writing the tools that defined the Web's basic structure: he gave them away, with CERN's blessing, no strings attached. While others made millions off his invention, the soft-spoken programmer went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT, which he still directs, to promote global Web standards and development.
Berners-Lee is finally getting his reward: in July he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and the previous month he received Finland's million-euro Millennium Technology Prize, awarded "for outstanding technological achievements that directly promote people's quality of life, are based on humane values, and encourage sustainable economic development."
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