he original proposal for the World Wide Web is tacked to a wall next to an overstuffed bookshelf in Tim Berners-Lee's cluttered office at MIT. Dated March 1989, the front page of the 20-page document looks like a comic book-style diagram: a jumble of boxes and clouds, with arrows and dotted lines pointing every which way.
''I encountered a lot of blank stares back then,'' Berners-Lee admits as he glances at the dog-eared printout.
Thirteen years later, we all know how the proposal turned out. In fact, it's difficult to overstate the impact of Berners-Lee's invention, which extends from primary school projects to global media companies like AOL Time Warner.
Although the British-born Berners-Lee, 47, an Oxford graduate, has been content to work out of the media spotlight, few would question the value of his tenacious behind-the-scenes technical leadership in bootstrapping his revolutionary idea into a global network.
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while he was working at the CERN research center in Switzerland, but most of the Web's development has taken place in Cambridge, where Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science when he moved to Massachusetts with his wife and two children.
And now, after spending much of the last decade solidifying World Wide Web standards and protocols, Berners-Lee has more time to push another proposal, for a next-generation Web that he calls the ''Semantic Web.'' Like his original Web proposal, Berners-Lee's vision is a mixture of big-picture cosmology and extremely detailed technical stratagems. Like the original Web, it's going to take a delicate balance of careful programming, politically savvy project management, and grassroots evangelism to achieve broad acceptance and applicability.
''It's the same challenge we faced with the Web: bringing the vision into reality,'' Berners-Lee says. ''That means on a Monday morning I always have to make a choice: Am I going to write some code, am I going to talk to The Boston Globe, or am I going to address a group of people who haven't quite got it, but who will be switched on and put a huge amount of energy into it?''
Berners-Lee is clearly hoping that this multitasking approach, which worked so well for the Web, will successfully launch the Semantic Web.
''The idea is that among all those blank stares, there are a few people whose eyes light up,'' he says. ''Then those people start contributing - writing a bit of software, evangelizing, doing whatever it takes to make it happen.''
Berners-Lee describes his new project as a ''Web of data rather than a Web of documents,'' and he emphasizes that it is not a replacement for the current Web, but an enhancement. Berners-Lee believes that the Web will never reach its full potential until it is based on information that conveys well-defined meaning, which will allow people and computers to use the information more effectively and efficiently. Berners-Lee is particularly focused on computers, because once we get better at defining the data on the Web, and its relation to other data, it will be dramatically easier for machines to process and manipulate the information without requiring the intervention of humans.
Examples? Berners-Lee's got a million of them.
''With a Semantic Web, you won't browse the Web if you're interested in buying tires,'' he says. ''You'll simply enter the kind of tire you currently are using and tell the computer, `Find 60 tires compatible with this.' Your computer will understand `compatible' and will return a list that automatically includes other brands: for example, Firestone tires that are compatible with your Goodyear tires.''
Later, Berners-Lee describes a Semantic Web search engine experience.
''You'll tell a search engine, `Find me someplace where the weather is currently rainy and it's within a hundred miles of such and such a city.' Today a search engine can go and find you pages with those words on them, but with the Semantic Web, it will come back and say, `Look, I found this place and I can prove to you why I know that it's raining and why I know it's within a hundred miles of this place.' So you'll be dealing with much firmer information.''
Berners-Lee is aware that these scenarios may appear less than amazing. But that's only because, at this stage of the project, he and the Semantic Web team at the World Wide Web Consortium, known as W3C, are still consumed with creating the foundation of the Semantic Web: the descriptions that will allow future generations of computers to build new levels of functionality using this more meaningful Web data.
For Berners-Lee, building the foundation of a new information space is a welcome return to his roots. When he was first creating the World Wide Web in the early '90s, Berners-Lee was an obscure programmer at CERN, the research center for particle physics outside Geneva. Originally designed to help organize the center's widely distributed researchers, Berners-Lee's invention gradually grew as he laboriously expanded its scope, often after hours, and proselytized it to early Internet and hypertext enthusiasts.
When Web usage started expanding exponentially in the early '90s, Berners-Lee eschewed the booming business opportunities in favor of establishing the nonprofit Web consortium at MIT. His aim, he said at the time, was the continual development of the Web as a universal resource free of corporate domination. Although many questioned his decision not to capitalize on the stock-crazed marketplace his invention was fueling, Berners-Lee defiantly stuck to his idealistic commitment to the creation of a global network.
''What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person's value depends on how important and financially successful they are and that that is measured in terms of money,'' he wrote in ''Weaving the Web,'' a book published in 1999.
''If your requirement is to make a large amount of money, then your options in life are rather small,'' he told the Globe later that year.
Today, Berners-Lee's career decision looks prescient. Although many of the early dot-com start-ups are in shambles, the World Wide Web Consortium has flourished. It now has 66 full-time staffers, 500 member organizations, and centers in France and Japan in addition to the headquarters in Cambridge. The consortium coordinates dozens of working groups, most powered by volunteers, on issues as diverse as accessibility and patent policy. And after nearly a decade of managing the organization, supervising the development of standards, and moderating software turf wars, Berners-Lee has earned the luxury of returning to what he enjoys most: ''focusing on the technical.''
''I've even been coding for the first time since 1994,'' he says happily, adding that he's been programming ''simple tools, small hacks, just little pieces of the puzzle.
''It's very reassuring to know that there are still very important questions that can be answered by writing a piece of code,'' he continues. ''Someone tells you, `That won't work.' And you go off and code it up and prove that it does, because here it is. That's a very powerful argument.''
Of course not everyone will be won over to the Semantic Web project. Many in the Web community are skeptical about such an ambitious project.
''The Semantic Web is a compelling idea that could allow you to do quite a bit, but the challenge is to keep it grounded in the real world,'' says Dale Dougherty, vice president of online publishing for O'Reilly & Associates, a publisher of computer books and technical Web sites. ''The Semantic Web needs to be simple and practical enough to implement and deploy, like the original vision of the Web. If they lose that focus, and try to come up with system for organizing all the world's knowledge, then it becomes a grand metaphysical exercise that never generates useful applications.''
Yet to John R. Ellis, senior vice president of engineering and operations at the AltaVista Co., ''meaning'' is the logical next frontier on the Web.
''Customers are no longer just looking for Web pages,'' Ellis says. ''Instead they are coming to us with questions like, `How do I fix my water heater?' So we're all going to have to develop better ways of understanding what the customer is looking for, and the meaning of the information out there. Keyword searches don't work for that.''
Regardless, Berners-Lee continues to work according to the same philosophy that informed his original Web proposal.
''I need to capture the relationship between things, and I always have,'' he said. ''And when you realize that all the data out there can just be expressed as a whole bunch of relationships between things, you feel you've got to do it, because you know it's going to be very powerful.''
Surprisingly, the collapse of the dot-com boom has helped Berners-Lee's mission.
''The bad news is that there isn't a lot of money around and a lot of people have lost their jobs,'' he says. ''The good news is that people here don't feel as if they have to immediately create a dot-com start-up. That means that they can play with a little less pressure.''
The Semantic Web faces some roadblocks. One is an increasing tendency toward patent litigation by software and technology companies. When the Web was first created, Internet-related software was not on the radar of corporate intellectual property lawyers. The dot-com boom, however, quickly raised its profile.
''We're at a very critical point regarding patents,'' Berners-Lee says. ''There's a real danger that corporate intellectual property lawyers will start enforcing patent claims on Internet standards.
''If we don't get this intellectual property issue right, there is a danger that the next Internet revolution won't happen,'' Berners-Lee says. ''It could mean that the Semantic Web doesn't really happen.''
Another impending challenge to Berners-Lee's semantic project will be the need to create demonstrations that will convince talented programmers, and the companies they work for, that the semantic project is worth the effort. Until now, most of the demos have been circumscribed and technical: narrow searches on small collections of data.
Berners-Lee admits that so far the Semantic Web demos haven't been mind-blowing. But, characteristically, he doesn't think it will be a problem where his gaze is focused: long term.
''So far, the demos have been small, but the real excitement will happen when they start to bump into each other around the edges and people start to combine them,'' he says. ''At this point, we have to demo just enough for some people to get a glint in their eyes.
''There's a certain sort of person who can see something once, on a small scale, and imagine the result when it's multiplied many, many more times,'' he continues. ''They can see that it will be really exciting, when the whole Semantic Web starts throbbing. And whoever gets it ends up necessarily drawn into trying to make it happen.
''That's the way it worked for the Web,'' he adds.
D.C. Denison can be reached at denison@globe.com.
