It could be that some scientific field will be the first to be sufficiently disciplined to input its data not just as cool hypertext, but in a machine-readable form, allowing programs to wander the globe analyzing and surmising … The knowledge-engineering field has to learn how to be global, and the Web has to learn knowledge engineering, but in the end this might be a way in which again the scientific field leads the world into something very powerful, and a new paradigm shift.
Predictor: Berners-Lee, Tim
Prediction, in context:Tim Berners-Lee posted the following in a September 1995 “Press FAQ” column on his Web site at the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org). The excerpt discusses the World Wide Web as a “paradigm shift” in the world to come: ”The Web today is a medium for communication between people, using computers as a largely invisible part of the infrastructure. One of the long-term goals of the consortium is ‘Automatability,’ the ability for computers to make some sense of the information and so help us in our task. It has been the goal of mankind for so long that machines should help us in more useful ways than they do at present, help us solve some of those human problems. Maybe this is one of the many ideas (like hypertext) which the Web’s great scale will allow to work where it did not achieve critical mass on a small scale before. So there are groups looking at a web of knowledge representation. It could be that some scientific field will be the first to be sufficiently disciplined to input its data not just as cool hypertext, but in a machine-readable form, allowing programs to wander the globe analyzing and surmising … The knowledge-engineering field has to learn how to be global, and the Web has to learn knowledge engineering, but in the end this might be a way in which again the scientific field leads the world into something very powerful, and a new paradigm shift.”
Biography:Tim Berners-Lee of CERN first released his revolutionary World-Wide Web for initial use in 1991 and with it shared his invention HTML (hypertext mark-up language). He later served as director of W3 Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations whose goal was to find ways to help the Web reach its full potential. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: September 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Global Relationships/Politics
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: W3.org
Title, headline, chapter name: Press FAQ: Collaboration and Automatability, Sept 95
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Bruno, Marian Theresa