Sir Timothy John "Tim"
Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA (born 8 June 1955),also known as
"TimBL," is a British computer scientist, best known as the inventor
of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system
in March 1989,and he implemented the first successful communication between a
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime
around mid November.
Berners-Lee is the director of the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He
is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior
researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of the Web Science
Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT
Center for Collective Intelligence.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by
Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected a
foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He was
honoured as the "Inventor of the World Wide Web" during the 2012
Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person, working at a
NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium. He tweeted "This is for
everyone”, which was instantly spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs
of the 80,000 people in the audience.
Early life
Berners-Lee was born in southwest
London, England, on 8 June 1955, one of four children born to Conway
Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents worked on the first
commercially-built computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. He attended Sheen Mount
Primary School, and then went on to attend south west London's independent
Emanuel School from 1969 to 1973. A keen trainspotter as a child, he learnt
about electronics from tinkering with a model railway.[15] He studied at
Queen's College, Oxford, from 1973 to 1976, where he received a first-class
degree in physics.
Career
In 1989, while working at at CERN, the
European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, Tim Berners-lee
proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based
on the earlier "Enquire" work, it was designed to allow people to work
together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote
the first World Wide Web server, "httpd", and the first client,
"WorldWideWeb" a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext
browser/editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment. This work was started in
October 1990, and the program "WorldWideWeb" first made available
within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.
Through 1991 and 1993, Tim continued
working on the design of the Web, coordinating feedback from users across the
Internet. His initial specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined and
discussed in larger circles as the Web technology spread.
Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the
Queen's College at Oxford University, England, 1976. Whilst there he built his
first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old
television.
He spent two years with Plessey
Telecommunications Ltd (Poole, Dorset, UK) a major UK Telecom equipment
manufacturer, working on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and
bar code technology.
In 1978 Tim left Plessey to join D.G
Nash Ltd (Ferndown, Dorset, UK), where he wrote among other things typesetting
software for intelligent printers, and a multitasking operating system.
A year and a half spent as an
independent consultant included a six month stint (Jun-Dec 1980)as consultant
software engineer at CERN. Whilst there, he wrote for his own private use his
first program for storing information including using random associations.
Named "Enquire" and never published, this program formed the
conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.
From 1981 until 1984, Tim worked at John
Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd, with technical design responsibility. Work
here included real time control firmware, graphics and communications software,
and a generic macro language. In 1984, he took up a fellowship at CERN, to work
on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system
control. Among other things, he worked on FASTBUS system software and designed
a heterogeneous remote procedure call system.
In 1994, Tim founded the World Wide Web
Consortium at the then Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) which merged with
the Artificial Intelligence Lab in 2003 to become the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT). Since that time he has served as the Director of the World
Wide Web Consortium a Web standards organization which develops interoperable
technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web
to its full potential. The Consortium has host sites located at MIT, at ERCIM
in Europe, and at Keio University in Japan as well as Offices around the world.
In 1999, he became the first holder of
the 3Com Founders chair. In 2008 he was named 3COM Founders Professor of
Engineering in the School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at CSAIL where he
also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). In December 2004 he was
named a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of
Southampton, UK. He was co-Director of the Web Science Trust, launched in 2006
as the Web Science Research Initiative, to help create the first
multidisciplinary research body to examine the World Wide Web and offer the
practical solutions needed to help guide its future use and design. He is a
Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, started in 2008 to fund and coordinate
efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
In June 2009 then Prime Minister Gordon
Brown announced that he would work with the UK Government to help make data
more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information
Task Force. Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures
behind data.gov.uk, a UK Government project to open up almost all data acquired
for official purposes for free re-use. Commenting on the opening up of Ordnance
Survey data in April 2010 Berners-Lee said that: "The changes signal a
wider cultural change in Government based on an assumption that information
should be in the public domain unless there is a good reason not to—not the
other way around." He went on to say "Greater openness,
accountability and transparency in Government will give people greater choice
and make it easier for individuals to get more directly involved in issues that
matter to them."
In
November 2009, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation in order to
"Advance the Web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs
that build local capacity to leverage the Web as a medium for positive
change."
Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices
in favour of Net Neutrality,[39] and has expressed the view that ISPs should
supply "connectivity with no strings attached," and should neither
control nor monitor customers' browsing activities without their expressed
consent.He advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network
right: "Threats to the Internet, such as companies or governments that
interfere with or snoop on Internet traffic, compromise basic human network
rights."
Berners-Lee
is President of the Open Data Institute.He is the author, with Mark Fischetti,
of the book "Weaving the Web" on the the past present and future of
the Web.
On March 18 2013, Tim, along with Vinton
Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreesen, was awarded the Queen
Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for "ground-breaking innovation in
engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity."
Awards
1995:
Kilby
Foundation's "Young Innovator of the Year" Award
ACM
Software Systems Award (co-recipient)
Honorary
Prix Ars Electronica
Distinguished
Fellow of the British Computer Society
1997:
Awarded
an Order of the British Empire (OBE)
IEEE
Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award
Duddell
Medal of the Institute of Physics
Interactive
Services Association's Distinguished Service Award
MCI
Computerworld/Smithsonian Award for Leadership in Innovation
International
Communication Institute's Columbus Prize
1999:
Named
"One of the 100 greatest minds of the century" by Time Magazine
World
Technology Award for Communication Technology
Honorary
Fellowship, The Society for Technical Communications
2000:
Paul
Evan Peters Award of ARL, Educause and CNI
Electronic
Freedom Foundation's Pioneer Award
George
R Stibitz Computer Pioneer Award, American Computer Museum
Special
Award for Outstanding Contribution of the World Television Forum
2002:
Japan
Prize, the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan
Prince
of Asturias Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technical Research (shared with
with Larry Roberts, Rob Kahn and Vint Cerf)
Fellow,
Guglielmo Marconi Foundation
Albert
Medal of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Art, Manufactures and
Commerce (RSA)
Common
Wealth Award for Distinguished Service for Mass Communications
2007:
Awarded
the Order of Merit by H.M. the Queen
Charles
Stark Draper Prize, National Academy of Engineering
Lovelace
Medal, British Computer Society
D&AD
President's Award for Innovation and Creativity
MITX
(Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange) Leadership Award
Foreign
Associate of the National Academy of Engineering
2008:
BITC
Award for Excellence
IEEE/RSE
Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award
Fellow,
IEEE
Pathfinder
Award, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
2009:
Foreign
Associate, National Academy of Sciences
Given
the title of Royal Designer by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts,
Manufacture nd Commerce
Webby
Awards Lifetime Achievement Award
2010:
UNESCO
Niels Bohr Gold Medal Award
2011:
The
Mikhail Gorbachev Award
DAMA
Web Awards, Bilbao Web Summit
2012
Internet
Hall of Fame
Honorary
Degrees:
·
Parsons
School of Design, New York (D.F.A., 1995)
·
Southampton
University (D.Sc., 1995)
·
Southern
Cross University (1998)
·
Open
University (D.U., 2000)
·
University
of Port Elizabeth (DSc., 2002)
·
Lancaster
University (D.Sc., 2004)
·
Universitat
Oberta de Catalunya (2008)
·
University
of Manchester (2008)
·
Universidad
Politécnica de Madrid (2009)
·
VU
University Amsterdam (2009)
·
Harvard
University (2011)
Selected
Publications
·
Berners-Lee,
T.J., et al, "World-Wide Web: Information Universe", Electronic
Publishing: Research, Applications and Policy, April 1992.
·
Berners-Lee
T.J., et al, "The World Wide Web", Communications of the ACM, August
1994.
·
Tim
Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web, Harper San Francisco, 1999
·
Tim
Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly, Ralph R. Swick "Web Architecture: Describing
and Exchanging Data", W3C Note, 1999/6-7.
·
Berners-Lee,
Tim. and Hendler, James "Publishing on the Semantic Web", Nature,
April 26 2001 p. 1023-1025.
·
James
Hendler, Tim Berners-Lee and Eric Miller, 'Integrating Applications on the
Semantic Web', Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan,
·
Hendler,
J., Berners-Lee, T.J., and Miller, E., ' Integrating Applications on the
Semantic Web ', Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, Vol
122(10), October, 2002, p. 676-680.
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