W3C have just announced that Tim Berners-Lee has been given the Order of the Merit. According to W3C:
Founded in 1902 by King Edward VII, the Order of Merit [1] is conferred by theTim is the "father of the Web" and was Knighted in 2003. Since working on HTTP and XML, he became the Director of W3C and has been overseeing efforts in Web Services, SOA and Semantic Web technologies. It's true to say that in one way or another he has been responsible for some of the greatest technology shifts of the past 20 years. As CNN said:
sovereign of the United Kingdom to "such persons, being subjects of our Crown,
as may have rendered exceptionally meritorious service in Our Crown Services,
or towards the advancement of the Arts, Learning, Literature and Science or
such other exceptional service as We see fit to recognise." Twenty four
individuals plus additional foreign recipients may hold the honor at one time.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the information superhighway known as the Web, which allows anyone with a computer and browser to use the Internet. Famously, he created it in his spare time, and gave it away for free.And the rest, as they say, is history. Tim and the W3C are actively driving SOA and Web Services development and adoption, with activities such as WS-Addressing, WS-Policy and the recent Workshop on Web of Services. There are times when Tim isn't afraid to speak against the collective and uses his prominent position well. For instance, speaking against the Web 2.0 hype, he once said:
Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.Tim's dream of a semantic Web has taken a few knocks over the years, but is still going strong. It's even started to propose mergers with Web Services (though whether that is a good thing or not for either side remains to be seen).
