Tim Berners-Lee on the value of the Semantic Web

Today's Web will be seen as 'just the tip of the iceberg' compared to the potential power of the Semantic Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, ECS professor and WSRI founder, told the BBC Today programme.

Speaking to the Today programme on Wednesday 9 July, Sir Tim said: 'In the short term the possibilities of the Semantic Web won't be visible to the casual Web user,' he said, 'but as we start to write programmes that can access, share, and reuse data, we'll end up by making a very powerful system which when we look back we'll say that the original Web of data was just the tip of the iceberg.'

He continued: 'At the moment the data out there isn't in a form that we can process and use, so we're not using it powerfully enough.'

Drawing attention to the establishment of the Web Science Research Initiative, a long-term partnership between ECS at Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sir Tim advocated the need for further study of the Web by creative people from many disciplines.