Tim Berners-Lee, co-founder of the World Wide Web, has received an honorary doctorate from Queensland’s Southern Cross University (SCU). The web guru was visiting Australia to address the Seventh International Worldwide Web (WWW7) conference (CI No 3,390), held in Brisbane last week. Currently the director of W3C, the consortium hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS), the Institut National de Recherch en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) and Japan’s Keio University, Berners-Lee was awarded the SCU doctorate in recognition of his development of tools which have radically improved the way universities share information. What he has enabled us to do is to give information, tuition and knowledge to our students which they otherwise would not have got, said Andrew Rogers, QC, SCU’s chancellor. The five-day WWW7 schedule featured keynote addresses from a bevy of international speakers. John Patrick, vice president of Internet Technology with IBM; Frans De Bruine, director of Information Market Policies with the European Commission; James Gosling, vice president, Sun Microsystems, and Xing Li, deputy director of China’s Education and Research Network, all made the trip south. This year’s conference took as its theme the evolution and interoperability of the World Wide Web, and its impact on the technical and social globalization of the world. It was the first international WWW conference to be held in the Southern Hemisphere, and the seventh in the series of events launched in 1994 by Web co-develper Robert Calliau.
