On Friday I had a chance to spend 2 hours discussing Web with Tim Berners-Lee. Tim is the founder and father of the WWW. The most important aspect of WWW is not only the technology but the social aspects of its evolution. And Tim is a key factor behind both.
Wendy Hall from Southampton had told me about him and I had spend some time discussing with him in a dinner meeting in Beijing. Of course one can read a lot about him on the WWW. But this meeting gave me a better glimse of why WWW is what it is and who Tim is. Even after all this success, he is still a hacker who wants to be able to do interesting thing using this toy called computer and the network. He is a true believer in the web or in the network. And he believes that this could help solve many knowledge and societal problems.
Two main topics of our discussion were experiemtial computing based on events and the Web doe Masses. I loved our discussion — learnt some new things and acquired a deeper belief in the web effect. My belief that events are a strong mechanism for creating deeper web also became stronger.
It will be great to work with Tim, Wendy, and others in exploring event related aspects of Web Science, creating EventWeb, and applying this among others to really create the Web that is World Wide by increasing its reach even to wider segment of humans in deeloping countries in remote areas.
Incidentally, my presentation for the Web Science Workshop in Beijing is available here.
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