Future of the Web

Tim Berners-Lee says the Internet will look drastically different five years from now and that it should be scientifically studied to track that evolution and development. Along with colleagues from the Web Science Research Initiative, Berners-Lee has been touring universities to encourage the adoption of Web science courses, emphasizing the challenges that the increasingly social Web presents. The growing amount of personal information on the Web creates several issues regarding where it comes from, who is allowed to access it, and who owns it. These questions are even more important when examining the possibility of online medical records and how to allow doctors to access the information while keeping it protected and hidden from employers and identity thieves. "It's about building systems and understanding where data is coming from," Berners-Lee says. He says that in the future people will no longer be entering personal information into individual social networks, but everyone will have a single profile that compiles all of the information related to them in one social network. "You will have something which is an application which is consistent for looking at different aspects of people," he says. "It [will use] your role as their friend for putting together a very powerful, all-encompassing view of them" online.