Quotes By Tim Berners Lee

I myself feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house. It supplies connectivity with no strings attached.

I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books.

Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.

I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways. So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

I think IT projects are about supporting social systems-about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.

In many ways, people growing up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take the power at their fingertips for granted.

The challenge is to manage the Web in an open way-not too much bureaucracy, not subject to political or commercial pressures. The U.S. should demonstrate that it is prepared to share control with the world.

The Google algorithm was a significant development. I've had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.

One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That's kind of important to me, and that's also kind of important to the whole future of the internet... obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.

Things can change so fast on the internet.

There was a time when people felt the internet was another world, but now people realise it's a tool that we use in this world.

I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years.

The Semantic Web isn't inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It's just about the relationships between things.

It's difficult to imagine the power that you're going to have when so many different sorts of data are available.

In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.

The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

Web pages are designed for people. For the Semantic Web, we need to look at existing databases.

I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions.

It was really hard explaining the Web before people just got used to it because they didn't even have words like click and jump and page.

The most important thing that was new was the idea of URI-or URL, that any piece of information anywhere should have an identifier, which will allow you to get hold of it.

One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn't have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

It's interesting that people throughout the existence of the web have been concerned about monopolies.

The Domain Name Server (DNS) is the Achilles heel of the Web. The important thing is that it's managed responsibly.

Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.

Celebrity damages private life.