Web’s Creator Starts Foundation to Apply Networking Technology to Social Problems

Washington

The inventor of the World-Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, this weekend announced plans for a new foundation to help promote the use of the Web for scientific research and to help ease the digital divide in developing nations.

The foundation, which is scheduled to begin operations early next year, received a $5-million kick-off grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Mr. Berners-Lee said the goals of the World Wide Web Foundation, as the new organization is called, are broader than another group he now leads at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called the World Wide Web Consortium. That body, started in 1994, focuses on setting technical standards for new Web features.

The new group hopes to work with standards groups, companies, and nonprofit organizations to see that Internet technologies are addressing societal needs, said Mr. Berners-Lee, at a press conference on Sunday.

“It’s looking at the social impact, the global responsibility as well as doing the science,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “We’ll work to produce a technology that is good for humanity, which will be good for democracy, which will be good for science.”

He said it is too soon to name concrete project the new foundation might tackle, but he listed assisting medical research of AIDS as a potential area of focus. “Involves different scientists who have different specialties, who at the moment have huge amounts of genetic data,” he said. “So one of the areas which is exciting now is looking at getting all that data integrated so that one scientist could manage to see across all of this and make a huge step — and make a new drug much more proficiently and much more rapidly.”

The idea for the Web began as a memo that Mr. Berners-Lee wrote while working at a scientist for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. He hoped the electronic data system could help scientists manage the large amounts of information they juggled on a daily basis.

“There are about the same number of Web pages as there are neurons in your brain. The bad news is that the number of Web pages is increasing,” he quipped.

The foundation hopes to raise $50-million to $100-million through a mix of large donors and individual contributions, according the group’s Web site.

Mr. Young is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education.