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Recognition at last - ShadowHM - 06-15-2004
Inventor of world wide web wins $1.65-million Prize
at 13:26 on June 15, 2004, EST.
HELSINKI, Finland (AP) - Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web, never received either the fame or the fortune accumulated by other Internet stars.
A lot of that changed on Tuesday when Berners-Lee received the first Millennium Technology Prize, a one million euro ($1.65 million Cdn) cash award recognizing his revolutionary contribution to humanity's ability to communicate.
The award, presented by Finland's president, Tarja Halonen, is among the largest of its kind, and Berners-Lee is its first recipient. It was established in 2002 and is backed by the Finnish government.
"Building the web, I didn't do it all myself," Berners-Lee, 49, said at the award ceremony.
"The really exciting thing about it is that it was done by lots and lots of people, connected with this tremendous spirit."
The prize committee outlined the award to be given for "an outstanding innovation that directly promotes people's quality of life, is based on humane values and encourages sustainable economic development."
"Isn't this like a definition of the World Wide Web?" asked Pekka Tarjanne, chairman of the prize committee, at the award ceremony.
Berners-Lee is recognized as the creator of the World Wide Web while working in the early 1990s for the CERN Laboratory, the European centre for nuclear research near Geneva, Switzerland. His graphical point-and-click browser, WorldWideWeb, was the first client that featured the core ideas included in today's web browsers - Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera and Mozilla among them.
In developing the browsing concept, he fleshed out the core communication protocols needed for transmitting web pages from servers to users, the HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol, and the so-called markup language used to create them, HTML.
The prize committee underlined the importance of Berners-Lee's decision to never strive to commercialize or patent his contributions to the Internet technologies he has developed.
Berners-Lee himself says he would never have succeeded, if he had been asking money for his inventions.
"If I had tried to demand fees . . . there would be no World Wide Web, there would be lots of small webs," he said.
He also remains modest about his achievements.
"I was just taking lots of things that already existed and added a little, little bit," Berners-Lee said.
But Tarjanne, the prize committee head, said "no one doubts who the father of the WWW is, except Berners-Lee himself."
During the 15 years since he began working on the WWW idea, his inventions have undergone rapid changes, but the underlying technology is precisely the same.
Berners-Lee, who is originally from Britain, was knighted in December last year. He continues to work at the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.
His recent project - which experts say is potentially as revolutionary as the World Wide Web itself - is called the semantic web. Very technical in nature, it is an attempt to bring an agreement on how information is stored on the Internet and to automatically organize the jungle of data found today on the net into a "web" of concepts.
The goal of the global database is to allow computers to use a form of intelligent reasoning about concepts and ideas in documents to sort out relevant information. This would in turn make it much easier for users to find only what they want to find, and nothing else.
In his acceptance speech, he focused on technology as an evolving process that is just in the beginning.
"All sorts of things, too long for me to list here, are still out there waiting to be done." he said. ". . . There are so many new things to make, limited only by our imagination. And I think it's important for anybody who's going through school or college wondering what to do, to remember that now."
The millennium award will be granted every two years and the Finnish government has agreed to supply the prize money.
The award committee has said it tries to roughly match the sum of the Nobel prizes, awarded in Sweden and Norway.