The World Wide Web is 15 years old. Therefore the
BBC asked some of the leading figures in the web community about their hopes for the future of the web.
Some interesting points how the web could look like in the future:
A mobile, pervasive/ubiquitous web
Computers, mobile phones and sensors will be connected in one web as suggested by Tim O'Reilly. Wendy Hall and Mitchell Baker point to the problem of presentation and access of information on mobile devices.
Personalization could be a solution for that problem. Mobility makes it possible to adapt the information access to the context of the user. On a small mobile screen, you would like to have only the information that is valuable in your current situation, otherwise you would be flooded with information. For example: A search result on your mobile phone for restaurants, should give you first the restaurants that are nearby, and that maybe your friends rated positively.
Tim O'Reilly
So we are going to see the phone network merge with the web, sensor networks merge with the web. I think we will even see the power network merge with the web.
What we are really building is a global brand where all the computers in the world are connected, where all the devices in the world are connected, sometimes intermittently off and on, and all the people are connected.
Professor Wendy Hall
Everything is going mobile. And I think the big issue about access was you need a computer at the moment to access it properly. [...] You will be able to access it. The technology and the interfaces will change so that it's much more accessible on a mobile device.
Mitchell Baker - Mozilla Foundation
In 15 years the web will be everywhere; in ways we don't know.
The web in that sense will be informational and the presentation of information will be in a way "we" like it.
A semantic web
Some predict that the web will be semantically annotated to find and combine information faster. Robert Cailliau also has a critical statement about the Semantic Web.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
In a hundred years, 15 years will seem to be just the infancy of the web, when the semantic web wasn't even completely deployed.
Professor Nigel Shadbolt
The future is the Semantic web
Robert Cailliau
In much less than 15 years I think we need to figure out what the social impact is going to be of the Semantic web. I am not sure this is a good thing.
I don't know who is controlling it. And because it works by onotologies, who decides on what basis I am going to see things?
Very interesting is also how some of the interviewees used the opportunity to make advertisement for their companies...
Picture by courtesy of Bull3t
