MIT, UK school form center to study Web

Though a billion people use it, nobody fully understands the World Wide Web -- not even Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented it.

So Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are teaming up with the University of Southampton in Britain to launch the Web Science Research Initiative. It's the first academic effort to develop a scientific understanding of how the Web works today and may work in the future.

Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1989 as an easy way to share vast amounts of scientific information. He developed HTML, the simple language used to create basic Web pages. But Berners-Lee was as surprised as anyone by the rapid public embrace of the Web. "We really just created the underlying rules," he said, "and then it created itself from a mass of humanity."

As a result, scientists don't have a complete understanding of how the millions of computers now on the Web interact . The institute wants to recruit mathematicians and computer scientists, but also psychologists and other social scientists, to develop models of how information is stored on the Web.

"We need people who understand the social and the technical aspects," said Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton. This will help them devise better ways to search for data, share it, and secure it against unauthorized access.

The institute will also help advance Berners-Lee's campaign to create the "Semantic Web," an advanced set of features that will make Internet data far easier to search and access.

In a Semantic Web, all information would be managed much the same as it is in today's corporate databases. This could reduce the need to use multiple Web searches to piece together information on a subject. Instead, a single well-designed query could generate a global search of thousands of computers, with the correct data delivered to the researcher in seconds.

Berners-Lee said that while the technology is nearing deployment, experts have yet to deal with potential perils, such as a loss of privacy. "As scientists, we have a duty to ask what could happen that's really, really exciting?" he said. "What could happen that's really, really frightening?"

Berners-Lee cited the rise of spam e-mails as a problem never foreseen by developers of the original Internet. He said the new Web institute will try to foresee the next wave of Internet problems before they become crises.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.