When Sir Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the foundations of the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, his manager called it “vague, but exciting.” How things have changed since then! Twenty-six years later, Berners-Lee won the ACM Turing Award “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first Web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.” This book is a compilation of articles on the original ideas of a true visionary and the subsequent research and development work he has led, helping to realize the Web’s full potential. It is intended for readers interested in the Web’s original technical development, how it has changed over time, and the social impacts of the Web as steered by Berners-Lee since the very beginning.

The book covers Berners-Lee’s development of the key protocols, naming schemes, and markup languages that led to his “world wide web” program and ultimately to the Web as we know it today. His early efforts were refined as Web technology spread around the world, and he was further guided by the work of the World Wide Web Consortium, which he founded and still directs. He was instrumental in the conceptualization and realization of the Semantic Web, a field that is gaining momentum in the age of big data and knowledge graphs; was a driving force for the field of Web Science, a new and growing research area dedicated to the study of both the engineering and the impacts of the Web; and he continues to innovate through his research work at MIT on open and decentralized information. Berners-Lee is also known for his contributions to keeping the Web open and ubiquitous via his work with the World Wide Web Foundation, the UK’s Open Data Institute and his recent call for a crowdsourced magna carta for the Web. This book will help the reader to understand how Sir Tim’s invention of the World Wide Web has revolutionized not just Computer Science, but global society itself.

Oshani Seneviratne is the Associate Director of the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an Assistant Professor in Computer Science. She was previously the Director of Health Data Research at the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Applications. Oshani obtained her S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Oshani's current research interests span data integration, knowledge representation, provenance, and decentralized systems. Oshani has authored over 50 scientific publications and received the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges award for her dissertation work on the HyperText Transfer Protocol with Accountability. Furthermore, Oshani cofounded and co-organized the AIChain workshop series co-located with the IEEE Blockchain conference, the Personal Health Knowledge Graph workshop series, the Healthcare and Life-Sciences and Decentralized Knowledge Graph Symposia at the Knowledge Graph Conference, and the AAAI Symposium on AI for Social Good. Oshani has served on the organizing committees of the International Semantic Web Conference, the Web Science conference, and several Blockchain conferences.

James Hendler is the Tetherless World Chair of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at RPI and the Director of the Rensselaer-IBM AI Research Collaboration. One of the originators of the "Semantic Web," Hendler is a Fellow of the AAAI, BCS, IEEE, AAAS, ACM and the US National Academy of Public Administration. Hendler has served as the Open Data Advisor to New York State, a member of the US Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee, a member of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information, and is currently a member of the Director's Advisory Committee for the National Security Directorate of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His most recent books (other than this one) are Social Machines: The Coming Collision of Artificial Intelligence, Social Networks and Humanity (Apress, 2017) and Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist - Third Edition (ACM Press).