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DIGITALWORLD
barely usable and required effort. “It [the internet] was
sneaking in. Physicists, like mathematicians, will just write a piece of software to make somethingwork if they can't find a function button, they just go and write it,” said Berners-Lee, telling the conference how the creation of the web was a near-run thing. “My boss approved the
purchase of a fewNeXTma- chines Steve Jobs had pro- duced and just to kick the tyreswith the newmachines I wrote a simple version of HTML and HTTP and pro- duced a memo and a few people noticed.”
THERE IS A 2002 MOVIE STARRING TOM CRUISE WHERE THE FUTURE SHOCKS APPARENT IN IT ARE ALREADY BECOMING REALITY. THE PROTAGONIST’S ability inMinorityReport to grab datawith his finger tips and open up images are abundantly obvious on devices like theKinect gam- ing console fromMicrosoft, new smart TVs from Samsung and theApple iPad. Thatmomentwhen hewalks down the street and a street sign
recognises him and suggests he could really use a Guinness is pretty much akin to e-commerce experiences on Amazon and Facebook and soon, thanks to our smartphones, technologies like RFID and location technology, we will see street signs adapt to the person passing by. And as for technology to predict the future?Well, using big data
a Cambridge student by the name ofMartinO’Learywas able to accurately predict that Swedenwouldwin this year’s Eurovision by studying themusical tastes ofmost Europeans. Frommy perch high up in the gods at theNationalConference
Centre in Dublin where the creator of the world wide web Tim Berners-Lee was presenting the keynote at the 2012 Teradata UniverseConference, his energy and enthusiasmwere apparent. The way Berners-Lee describes it, the internet revolution of
the last 20 or so years that we all take for granted today was a near-accident born of desperation.But no near-accident is the im- pact of open data and how the late Steve Jobs played a role in bringing forward the revolution inHTML5. By the timeBerners-Lee got round to creating theweb in 1990
– effectively the internet aswe knowit by fusing hypertext toTCP (transmission control protocol) – the internet was already 20 years old in his eyes. It justwasn't usable formost folk. In 1969, the year theUSput aman on themoon, the internet ex-
isted asArpanet, amilitary data network. In 1990, as a fellow at CERN on the France/Switzerland bor-
der, use of the internetwasmainly an academic pursuit slowly fil- tering out among colleges and research institutes, but it was
52 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW Issue 4 Spring/Summer 2012 Theworldwideweb aswe knowitwas born during aChristmas
break, but the significance of the eventwas overtaken by tumul- tuous events like the fall of the BerlinWall. The rest is history – Berners-Leemoved toMIT and headed up theWorldWideWeb Consortium, a revolution that has since shaped our lives. Today, it is impossible to imagine life without the internet; life
without Facebook, YouTube, the ability to buy airline tickets on- line, pay motor tax online, or pull up a search or make a Skype call on your smartphone.
INTERNET'S NEXT EXCITING PHASE Considered one of the pioneering fathers of the internet, Bern- ers-Lee believeswe are only at the dawn of an evenmore exciting era – that of open data and the semanticweb,where almost every feasible physical device or piece of datawill be interlinked online. “The semantic web vision has taken a long time to come to
fruition because theweb is so exciting inmany otherways,” said Berners-Lee, who has been driving new metadata labelling for- mats tomake everything linkable. The future web we are about to see will be one in which data
and devices everywhere will be interlinked andmetadata is cen- tral to this – effectively who owns A or B in the same way indi- viduals own the deeds to their homes, but the difference is allowing this data to be usable and open. Berners-Lee cites the corner boxes you see onWikipedia, for
example, as a case of howdatabases and datasets can be globally linked. This brings us on to the next big revolution – open data – and
he said governments and businesses are at the forefront of open- ing up datasets for individuals, citizens and other businesses to make more informed decisions. On one level, this could be local councils opening up data to allow citizens to find out where the potholes are, on another level it could be businesses sharing en- vironmental or healthcare data that can then be linked across the country or theworld.
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