Web inventor strategises on the next big thing

• The aim of the Semantic Web is to add metadata to information placed online, to allow it to be readable by machines.
• Semantic Web enhances search mechanisms with respect to exactness and amounts of information because of the standardised web annotations.
• It provides more flexibility to management, presentation and use of data on the web than the current web technologies.

Kenya played host to one of the most influential individuals of this century and it was not International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor, Louis Moreno-Ocampo. It was Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Time magazine named Berners-Lee (pictured above) as one of the 100 most influential thinkers of this century for creating the first Internet server and website.

It has been reported that Prof Berners-Lee interacted with a cross-section of Kenyan web stakeholders including government, parliament, academia, techies, industry and civil society.

And that this was a fact-finding mission to understand how his invention is being exploited and to profile the Web Foundation (www.webfoundation.org) and the Science Research Initiative (www.wsri.org).

But not satisfied with merely giving birth to the world-wide-web (www), Prof Berners-Lee is in the process of removing the remaining boundaries of the Internet, which has changed the way the world does business today.

Now he has focused his attention on the continued dominance of open standards, the power of Web services and - perhaps most important - the idea of a Semantic Web.

The aim of the Semantic Web is to add metadata to information placed online, to allow it to be readable by machines.

An online catalog could, for instance, connect to a user’s order history and preferences, and to a calendar, to automatically pick out available times for a product delivery.

In a normal workplace or home your computer will have your files, your documents and data files.

All these can’t be put on the Web.

So, for example, if you are looking at a Web page, you find an event that you want to attend.

The event has a venue, time and organisers.

But you have to read the Web page and separately open your calendar to put the information on it.

This is because your address book file and your original data files are not integrated.

And they are not integrated with the data on the Web.