Before exploring the development of the Web , we must take a step back and discuss the theoretical and practical creation of this platform that transformed the world.

In the words of Ben Segal :

“ In August 1984 I wrote an article to the Head of the SW Group (at CERN)  Les Robertson , to describe a pilot project to install and evaluate the TCP/IP protocol on some non-Unix machines at CERN […] By around 1990 CERN had become the largest site in Europe […] and the world. A key result of all this was that by around 1989 the CERN internet network would become the basis from which Tim Berners-Lee would create the World Wide Web as a truly ideal idea… ”

– Ben Segal, Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN, April 1995

The development of the World Wide Web

The development of the Web began in 1980, when Englishman Berners-Lee , a employee of CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research , in Switzerland – developed ENQUIRE , a project used to recognize and store associations of information . Each new page in this system was supposed to be connected to another existing page in the system.

Back in 1984, Berners-Lee returned to CERN and encountered a very current problem: the presentation and connection of information.

Scientists around the world needed to share data , but the lack of a single platform made things somewhat complicated. So he prepared a proposal for a large database with hyperlinks , which didn't generate much interest.

And here a key figure enters the story: Mike Sendall , in Tim's own words :

"It was Mike who followed up on my idea of ​​getting one of the 'NeXT' machines, and Mike suggested that I could go ahead and use it to play around with the idea of ​​global hypertext, something I was researching. When Robert Cailliau and I couldn't figure out how to run the World Wide Web project between the two different divisions we were in, Mike advised us to keep going."

It was Sendal who encouraged him to implement his system on the newly acquired NeXT workstation. Several names were considered for this new network connecting scientific documents: Information Mesh , The Information Mine , or Mine of Information , but we ended up with WWW – World Wide Web .

The Web was designed to be semantic from the start.

It's easy to understand that the initial problem encountered, namely, making different systems understand the same documents, was already a semantic .

It wasn't until 2001 that the idea of ​​a semantic web . The article " Semantic Web: A new format for web content that has meaning for computers will start a revolution of new possibilities, " published in Scientific American , provided the "theoretical starting point" for what we are beginning to see the first results of today.

The authors of this important article are Tim Berners-Lee , James Hendler , and Ora Lassila .

The pioneers of the Semantic Web

Tim Berners-Lee

The best known of these three is actually Berners-Lee , who is the current president of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and a professor MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory .

Perhaps one of the most important researchers of our century and considered by many to be one of the greatest geniuses of our time.

James Hendler

James Hendler works with Artificial Intelligence at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the United States.

Hendler has a long career as a professor at the University of Maryland, where he was Director of the Joint Institute for Knowledge and held joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the Institute for Advanced Computational Studies, and the Research , in addition to serving as Director of Semantic Web and Agent Technology

He is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the British Computer Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the AAAS, and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Ora Lassila

Ora Lassila is a technology architect and strategist, currently working at Nokia Services and a member of Nokia's CEO Technology Council. He was an elected member of the W3C Advisory Board from its inception in 1998 until 2013, and also represented Nokia on the W3C Advisory Committee from 1998 to 2002.

He was a member of the Steering Committee of the Semantic Web Science Association.

SEO perspective . In the first part Semantic SEO series, we will talk about how semantics will create a New Web .