This blog entry stems from a course assignment in INF 202 Introduction to Data and Databases. My topic is the potential future of the world wide web. During a Ted Talk, Tim Berners-Lee discussed the future of the world wide web and what it had the potential to become ( http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html ).
In this video, Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the world wide web), brings up many key points which are relevant to the future of his creation. After the creation of the world wide web, people were able to share personal data and other forms of information via the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee states that in the future there will hopefully be a way to connect many different pieces of data which are relevant to each other. For instance, Berners-Lee shows that after setting a name for a building on a wiki page, it shows up on a street map web page. One key point he stresses is the relevance of the amount of data put out into the world. The more data created, the more likely it is able to be connected. If every person shares just a little bit of data, the size of the amount of data available will greatly increase in size. Another important part of the discussion is for us as the people to demand the data from our government which we as tax payers are fully deserving of. Instead of keeping data to ourselves and stored in our own computers, sharing certain data will be quite useful to many people. When conducting a web search for something very specific, it is often very hard to find what you are looking for. With more data, users are more likely to find what they are looking for, increasing the convenience of the Internet.
It is very important to hear about the future of the world wide web because it has become one of the most widely used services not just throughout our nation, but the world as a whole. Although some are hesitant to share certain information over the Internet due to privacy issues, there are some aspects of data sharing which would greatly benefit the people. The main reason people use the Internet is because of the ease of use and convenience. With this in mind, why wouldn’t the people be encouraged to openly share data in order to increase the convenience of this utility even more? By viewing data recorded from the past, we are more likely to predict what is in store for the future as well as see where our society is at today. One simple example of this data sharing is the use of social networks. There are many social networks out there that are completely unrelated and do not share data with each other. If there was a new social network created that became more popular than Facebook or Twitter, it would be like pushing a reset button. All your past friendships, posts, and pictures shared through one network would not be brought over into the new one. However, if these networks openly shared data, it would be much more of a convenience to switch over or be involved in multiple social networks. I believe as time progresses, there will be more and more data shared over the world wide web and this will become a standard for users on the Internet.
Professor Alex Jurkat