News

At Telluride event, creators of Web, Net offer their visions

They made
small keystrokes for man, giant leaps for mankind.

And on Saturday a founding father of the Internet and
the creator of the World Wide Web were at the
third-annual Telluride Technology Festival talking
about what might be next: an interplanetary Internet
and a Web that helps computers automatically chat
with each other to better serve users.

By Electa Draper
Denver Post Four Corners Bureau

His isn’t a household name, but Vinton Cerf was the
head of the team that conceived the Internet as a
broad community tool, trotting it out in 1983 into a
world it changed forever. Cerf, along with his partner
Robert Kahn, defined the Internet Protocol, a way in
which packets of information are sent from one
computer to another.

This network of networks made up of computers and
cables made possible Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of a
World Wide Web of information, available at anyone’s
fingertips. He rolled out the first Web server in 1990,
when he was 35.

As the inventor of "www" as the entryway to an
infinitely expanding universe of information,
Berners-Lee is credited with creating the so-called
prime use or "killer application" of the Internet, a
simple way for computer users seeking information to
link up with the computers storing that information.

By 1993, according to tech festival organizer Scott
Brown, Berners-Lee managed to get CERN, the
European Particle Physics Laboratory where he
consulted while developing the Web, to certify that this
Web technology was public domain, "free and open to
everyone forever."

So, in the world of the computer savvy, Cerf and
Berners-Lee are both revolutionaries and aristocracy.

"Every time I type "www’ I should think of
Berners-Lee," Brown said.

Cerf, winner of the National Medal of Technology in
1997 and currently a senior vice president at
WorldCom, and Berners-Lee, director of the W3
Consortium, talked about what now excites them in
technology to a rapt audience in Telluride.

Cerf is working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and
other collaborators to extend the Internet backbone
into deep space. This InterPlaNet likely would reach
first to Mars, or at least a satellite orbiting Mars that
could send information back to Internet users on
Earth.

"You can have space exploration while sitting at home
on Earth," Cerf said. "By the end of this decade I
would hope that we have a two-planet Internet in
place."

But in the fullness of time he wants the network to
span the solar system and beyond.

"It’s way cool to start something like this, even if we
don’t get to see the end of it," Cerf said. "I feel like
I’m living in a science-fiction movie."

Berners-Lee’s project, the Semantic Web, is about
better living through computers with improved
language skills. They would have more powerful
vocabularies, which, along with enhanced logic skills,
would enable them to read a new form of Web content
and automatically provide users with more complete,
useful and trustworthy information.

With the Semantic Web, computers could perform
sophisticated tasks, such as planning a trip, using
pieces of software, sometimes referred to as agents.
It would be done without all the prodding, searching,
filtering and compiling Web users now must engage in.

The software or agent would hunt database after
database to find pertinent information and carry out
jobs, such as making reservations or appointments.

"The Semantic Web is not very flashy, multimedia
stuff, but it’s what I’m excited about now,"
Berners-Lee said.

The Semantic Web is not artificial intelligence, or
machines that can think, he said, but its development
would be an important springboard for that work.

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E33%257E787926%257E,00.html

Sorry, we couldn't find any posts. Please try a different search.

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.