Keynote Speaker

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Title: The Future of Web Applications

Abstract:

"Web applications currently provide greater flexibility and more effective human interface than static Web pages. As client-side storage is added, Web applications and desktop applications become closer, although significant differences remain. The open standards (HTML, SVG, CSS, etc.) vie with proprietary systems (Air, Silverlight, etc.) for the presentation side. RDF, XML, JSON, SPARQL and SQL compete as data access techniques. There is a blossoming of code and widget libraries. On social networking sites, application portability and data portability are concerns of the day, for developers and users. We must ask ourselves in the long term, how we would like the Web application platform to evolve, and what facilities would be useful in the future."

Biographical Information:

A graduate of Oxford University, England, Tim Berners-Lee holds the 3Com Founders chair and is a Senior Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is co-Director of the new Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and is a Chair in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK. He directs the World Wide Web Consortium, founded in 1994.

In 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.

In 2001 he became a fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany's Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth. He is the author of "Weaving the Web".