Tim Berners-Lee, the physicist credited with inventing hypertext markup language and the World Wide Web, wants more out of the medium. In a keynote address to the Internet Commerce Expo (ICE) last week, Berners-Lee said: Your data needs to be understood not by people, but by machines. He reflected on the many limitations of the web as it exists today, saying: It’s amazing how much you can do with a search engine – and it’s also amazing how much you can’t do with a search engine.
His answer: intelligent agents, shopping bots and machine- readable protocols for web sites. If you have an ad on a page somewhere, it probably says something like, ‘Honda for sale, good runner’, Nowhere does it say ‘car’, Berners-Lee observed. In cases like this, simple screen scraping just isn’t effective. You need to present your content in a format where there is data behind that is apparent to an agent. If this is done, he said: It will have an unbelievable effect… Lots of people feel that commerce is just people browsing, but there’s more to it than that. More and more people are using programs and agents to shop for the best deal, and that’s how they’re going to be getting to your site. Consumers will be using buying machines, and all business-to-business transactions will be by machine. This is big.
Berners-Lee, an Englishman based in Switzerland, also had some acerbic comments on the self-regulatory privacy regime that now exists in the United States. In the US, the general feeling is that it’s OK to pass along personal information with the person’s consent, he noted. In Europe, however, [privacy] is seen as an inalienable right. You can’t pass around someone’s shoe size under any circumstances.
