Thinking on the Web: Berners-Lee, Gödel and Turing

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EMPOWERING THE INFORMATION AGE

OVERVIEW

It is widely accepted that the technology of today’s Information Age has had a major impact on global communications and commerce and that this will continue to yield major improvements in human productivity. However, while the World Wide Web is making significant contributions to this progress, there remain many challenges to its further development into a resource with intelligent features.

For the Information Age to achieve its full potential in improving human productivity, at least two key new advances must still be achieved: (1) ubiquitous access to transaction applications of all types and (2) intelligent software applications enabling automated transactions.

For example, Web Services require human processing to be implemented. In addition, Web Services rely on the interoperation of two competing proprietary server frameworks to successfully communicate complex business logic. The solution of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to both of these problems is to deliver automatic machine processing globally through a Web architecture utilizing layers of open markup languages.³

In this chapter, we begin by highlighting what we mean by the concepts of “thinking” and “intelligent applications” on the Web. Then, we present the development of the Information Age and the emergence of the Web as an empowering force for global change. We discuss the forces behind the Information Revolution that are transforming the world’s economic and social ...