Gates Predicts Big Technological Leaps
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Mar 13, 12:37 PM (ET)

By MATTHEW BARAKAT

(AP) Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 12, 2008,...
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WASHINGTON (AP) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates said Thursday he expects the next decade to bring even greater technological leaps than the past 10 years.
In a speech to the Northern Virginia Technology Council, Gates speculated that some of the most important advances will come in the ways people interact with computers: speech-recognition technology, tablets that will recognize handwriting and touch-screen surfaces that will integrate a wide variety of information.
"I don't see anything that will stop the rapid advance," Gates said, noting that technological change driven by academia and corporate researchers continued even after the Internet stock bubble burst in 2000.
Gates also said the coming years will bring rapid changes in media as television increasingly becomes a targeted medium, where viewers can select niche content for news, sports and entertainment.
"TV will be based on the Internet; it will be an utterly different thing," he said.
Gates' speech came after he testified to Congress on Wednesday advocating greater investment in math and science education and more relaxed immigration rules that would allow foreigners who obtain college degrees in the United States to work here after graduation.
Current policy, he said, forces many bright, capable students to return to their native countries after the U.S. has invested in their education.
Gates said Thursday he was optimistic that policy makers would make the right decisions about investing in technology and human capital, though he acknowledged that such investments don't pay off immediately.
"Historically the United States has done a fantastic job of making the right investments," he said. "I think other countries, having seen that, are starting to duplicate those elements."

March/April 2008
A Technology Surges
In Iraq, soldiers conducting frontline street patrols finally get software tools that let them share findings and plan missions.
By David Talbot
First Lieutenant Brian Slaughter wanted his comrades to learn from the insurgent attack that could have killed him on May 21, 2004. Before dawn, the 30-year-old had been leading 12 men in three armored Humvees along a canal in Baghdad's al-Dora district when a massive blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) lifted his vehicle off the ground. Concealed attackers followed with a volley of rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire. But the IED had been buried too deep to kill, a second IED detonated too early to hit the patrol, and a third failed to explode. When the brief battle ended, two insurgents were dead, and ten were prisoners. On the American side, one man had been injured, with a bullet to the leg.

Slaughter knew that information about the encounter could help his fellow soldiers--especially green replacements arriving from Fort Stewart, GA--avoid getting killed or maimed. It might help them capture insurgents, too. So when dawn broke, he explored the blast site with a digital camera. He took pictures of the mound of brown earth concealing the still-unexploded second IED, and of a red-and-white detonator cord that led to the device. He took pictures of a berm and a copse of palm trees that had concealed the enemy. He took pictures of the improvised weapon: a 155-­millimeter artillery shell that had been drilled out and fitted with a fuse.

But his attempts to share the information ran into a technological roadblock. Back at Camp Falcon, a facility on the southern outskirts of Baghdad that's one of a handful of so-called forward operating bases around the city, he typed up a document in Microsoft Word and appended his photos. The report went to a battalion intelligence officer swamped by two or three dozen such reports daily. The intelligence officer's summaries went into a database called ASAS-L. A product of Cold War thinking, the database allows top commanders to monitor and coördinate troop movements--but it's not easily accessible to patrol leaders like Slaughter.

So for practical purposes, his report didn't exist. Even the version that stayed on his computer at Camp Falcon eventually vanished. "It went home with my unit. There was no server. No continuity. Nothing," he says. The pictures survive --on his laptop in Nashville, TN. He showed them to me, along with lots of other pictures that might have had some value to his fellow soldiers, including one of the smiling principal of a girls' school in Baghdad and one of an Iraqi translator--later killed, Slaughter says--interviewing someone who Slaughter says was believed to be an imam with ties to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But the days of patrol leaders operating half-blind on the deadly streets of Iraq are drawing to a close. After a two-year rush program by the Pentagon's research arm, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, troops are now getting what might be described as Google Maps for the Iraq counterinsurgency. There is nothing cutting-edge about the underlying technology: software that runs on PCs and taps multiple distributed databases. But the trove of information the system delivers is of central importance in the daily lives of soldiers.

The new technology--called the Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR--is a map-centric application that junior officers (the young sergeants and lieutenants who command patrols) can study before going on patrol and add to upon returning. By clicking on icons and lists, they can see the locations of key buildings, like mosques, schools, and hospitals, and retrieve information such as location data on past attacks, geotagged photos of houses and other buildings (taken with cameras equipped with Global Positioning System technology), and photos of suspected insurgents and neighborhood leaders. They can even listen to civilian interviews and watch videos of past maneuvers. It is just the kind of information that soldiers need to learn about Iraq and its perils.

For some units, anyway, the database is becoming the techno­logical fulcrum of the counterinsurgency. More than 1,500 junior officers--about a fifth of patrol leaders--are already using the technology, which was first deployed in early 2007. The first major unit to use it--the First Brigade Combat Team, First Cavalry Division--returned to the United States in late January. A few days before leaving Camp Taji, northwest of Baghdad, one soldier in this unit, Major Patrick Michaelis--who had many better things to do--paused to write an effusive 1,000-word e-mail to Tech­nology Review. He said that the technology had saved the lives of soldiers by allowing them to avoid IEDs, and that it enabled them to make better use of intelligence, capture insurgents, and improve their relationships with local people. "The ability ... to draw the route ... of your patrol that day and then to access the collective reports, media, analysis of the entire organization, is pretty powerful," Michaelis wrote. "It is a bit revolutionary from a military perspective when you think about it, using peer-based information to drive the next move. ... Normally we are used to our higher headquarters telling the patrol leader what he needs to think."

Baghdad route planner: A new map-based application allows patrol leaders in Iraq to learn about city landmarks and past events and enter new data. In this mock-up provided by DARPA (the map does not reflect actual events), the purple line shows a possible Baghdad patrol route. Past events in a 300-meter buffer are noted. Hostile actions, such as IED attacks or shootings, appear as various red icons; friendly actions, such as visits to schools, appear as blue icons. Clicking the icons brings up text, photos, even videos.
Courtesy of DARPA

A Granular Environment
The Pentagon has long talked about empowering soldiers with information. Some new networking technologies were deployed during the Iraq invasion, albeit with mixed results (see "How Tech Failed in Iraq," November 2004). And back in the United States, the Pentagon has been pursuing multibillion-dollar R&D programs with names like Future Combat Systems. These programs anticipate a day when aircraft, ground vehicles, robots, and soldier-mounted sensors collect masses of information; new software makes sense of it all, detecting changes and identifying targets; and wireless networking technologies link fighting units and even individual soldiers, who might have digital displays mounted to their helmets. Such technologies are part of the military's long-term plan to introduce what is sometimes called "network- centric warfare."

Generally, however, these high-tech visions have not meant much to the soldiers and marines patrolling dangerous streets in Iraq. U.S. troops conduct more than 300 street patrols around the country every day; those patrols make up one of the war's principal fronts. But for the most part, the leaders of the patrols have found it difficult to access digital information about their routes. Intelligence dissemination was stuck for years in another era. "We have a tendency in the army and marines and air force to build systems, first of all, that are platform-centric [built to ride on, say, a tank or a plane] and second, to build them for the higher echelons," says Pat O'Neal, a retired brigadier general who acts as an advisor to DARPA--and whose son is currently serving in Iraq. "Because that's where we felt, in the Cold War, the emphasis had to be, for the coördination of forces on a very large scale. That didn't set us up for success when we found ourselves in Iraq. It is a very granular environment, a very block-to-block environment."

Soldiers had no consistent way to submit reports; many carried old-fashioned "green books" for handwritten notes, while some tried to set up homegrown databases. And report writing varied from camp to camp. The need for something better was obvious. In 2005, DARPA started tackling the problem at Fort Hood, TX, with the help of returning soldiers from the First Brigade Combat Team. Programmers from companies that contracted with DARPA (including Ascend Intel, where Slaughter is now director of business development) interviewed soldiers to learn what they needed.

A prototype of the system was shown to soldiers for the first time during a training exercise at Fort Hood in April 2006, and in January 2007, it was introduced in Iraq. There, programmers observed how the troops used it; they collected feedback and quickly made changes. Finally--with help from the Rapid Equipping Force, an army unit devoted to quickly moving new gear into the field--the system reached the 1,500 patrol leaders using it now. Deploying it widely required dealing with two main challenges raised by Iraq's spotty data connections: how to synchronize scattered copies of the same database, any one of which a returning patrol leader might modify, and how to give soldiers multimedia information without crashing the system. One solution was a network that carefully rations out bandwidth. For example, the default mode for any photograph is a thumbnail version. A soldier has to click on the thumbnail to see a larger version and will get a response only if bandwidth allows.

"This is something I've heard from a couple of generals: there are lots of technologies that get pushed out to Iraq because engineers want to help, but they are niche applications," says Mari Maeda, the DARPA program manager in charge of the effort. "This application is broadly used by patrol leaders, on a day-to-day basis. I think the impact is very, very large." O'Neal offers an even less restrained assessment: "Best technology I've seen for small units in the past 40 years."

Walter Perry, a senior researcher at the Rand think tank in Arlington, VA, and a Vietnam-era army signals officer, also welcomes the new system. Perry works with a Pentagon-wide task force that has been trying to combat the scourge of IEDs through advanced intelligence gathering and new kinds of sensors and detectors. "One of the very first things we did in looking at the IED problem was to recognize that the army is trying to fight an insurgency with a pretty blunt instrument," Perry says. "This is about 90 percent police work and 10 percent violent conflicts. Patrols--the cop on a beat--fill out a report saying, Here is what I did. You get situational awareness." And that is of key importance in fighting IEDs, he says.

Data center: The new software documents the fabric of life in Iraq. In this mock-up (which does not reflect accurate data), a Baghdad neighborhood is set off by a purple boundary, and places, people, and events are marked by color-coded icons. Soldiers can click the icons and scroll through lists for more information. For example, thumbnail photos showing the aftermath of an IED attack appear next to the list. Thousands of photos are stored in the application's database.
Courtesy of DARPA

Technology Gap
With the new DARPA technology, soldiers are getting more and better information. But some experts say that for the soldiers to be truly empowered, military doctrine and organization will need to change too. "I have seen one after another of these interesting networking technologies come along, and none of them has made a dent in the institutional resistance to organizational change or doctrinal innovation," says John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, who is a progenitor of the concept of network organization in the military. Yes, he says, patrol leaders can now enter information into the system more easily. But "we still have divisional-, ­brigade-, and battalion-level structures, mostly on supersized forward operating bases, with the number of smaller outposts relatively few. If we are going to talk about a networked warfare, we need to put the network front and center in our thinking." One way to do that is to deploy soldiers in smaller groups with more authority to make decisions.

That's what happened in 2001, when special-operations forces were chasing al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan. When a team identified a target, it did not have to send a report up the chain of command and wait for a decision before acting. It could call on comrades and even call in air strikes. "If you believe that the real implication of the Information Age is the empowerment of small groups--and if there is any lesson from 9/11, that is it--we are really talking about information that allows small groups of people to do striking things," says Arquilla. The Iraq counterinsurgency should fight the same way the special forces fought in Afghanistan, he says.

Still, even without the kinds of organizational changes that Arquilla is advocating (see "Network Warfare"), DARPA's new software system is empowering frontline soldiers and shaping operations. For example, in a telephone interview from Camp Falcon, 28-year-old Captain David Lively described how TIGR once helped soldiers track down a pair of mortar attackers. One night, Lively recalled, soldiers on patrol radioed back to base that they were being shelled. At the base, other soldiers tapped into the database and quickly found earlier reports of mortars coming from an intersection of two canals in the vicinity. "TIGR provided some real-time history to where we could look back where a common source was coming from," Lively said. The soldiers at the base radioed the findings to their comrades and to a circling Apache helicopter. The pilot headed for the spot and was able to pursue a fleeing pickup truck with mortar tubes in its bed.

Michaelis says such anecdotes are not uncommon. "I can't name the number of times that patrol leaders and company commanders have turned to me and stated [that] their most important tool they have to fight this fight has been TIGR," he wrote. "I've had ... time-sensitive operations that were able to make associations between the target being handed to them and local residents, [allowing the soldiers to find insurgents who otherwise would have escaped]. I've had patrol leaders avoid potential IED hot spots or pass on IED tactics to their fellow patrol leaders."

And the technology is poised to expand. For now, it is accessible only at military bases. The next step, says Maeda, is to install it in Humvees and other military vehicles, allowing soldiers to download and act on new information in real time. Some of these vehicles already have some low-bandwidth connections, and Maeda says DARPA is working on ways to make the software work using these thin pipes. In addition, the system may soon deliver new kinds of information. In the next two to three years, it could offer surveillance pictures from circling unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or other sensor systems. It could store biometric information, so that a soldier could see if a civilian being interviewed was a known insurgent suspect. "There is a whole list of enhancements that users have requested that we want to fill," Maeda says.

If those enhancements are realized, the result will look a lot like a deployed version of what the Pentagon's big R&D programs have been pursuing. But TIGR is growing organically, in response to the needs of soldiers on the ground. It might be going too far to say that this technology will be the one to force doctrinal and organizational change; perhaps not everyone will embrace it. "No doubt it causes discomfort in those comfortable in traditional intel development," Michaelis writes. As O'Neal points out, however, everyone involved in fighting the Iraq insurgency is motivated to save soldiers' lives by every means possible. In some cases, it's quite personal. "I'm focused on contemporary technology for the current force," O'Neal says. "It's all for my son."

David Talbot is Technology Review's chief correspondent.

Copyright Technology Review 2008.

Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Why the AFSA Survey Is Right: Favoritism Charge is Real
By PHK
Last week, I reviewed the results of the American Foreign Service Association’s fall 2007 survey of active duty Foreign Service employees for a talk I was giving here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As I reread the survey’s summary of responses on AFSA’s website, it came even clearer to me than previously that the major issue affecting Foreign Service members was the perception – at least - of undue favoritism in the State Department that benefited far too few individuals. Such charges can be part and parcel of any organization – but when they are believed by so many people on the inside they need additional investigation to help separate fact from fiction. So I thought I’d dig around a little this past week to see whether or not the perception of favoritism at the State Department was real.
Maybe this is simply the sign of the times in these United States – the widening division between the haves and the have nots. Maybe it is the result of an excessively hierarchical system worsened by, in my view, an unnecessary division into two classes of professional US Foreign Service employees: the Senior Foreign Service and the regular services, a divided and unnecessarily divisive system that since it’s inception almost 30 years ago has over-compensated a few at the expense of too many. This is one reason why today the Foreign Service lacks enough qualified officers trained in Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Russian and other difficult languages.
Whatever the reason, the AFSA survey hit - with its very high response rate - a raw nerve among State Department higher ups and resulted in denials by several. Those who most vociferously objected to the survey’s veracity, of course, were a few of the very people who have also most benefited from the system the way it is.
Survey results mischaracterized in too much of the MSM

Meanwhile, the AFSA survey results were mischaracterized. misconstrued and often twisted in too much of the US main stream media. Although there were a very few exceptions, the vast majority of stories stressed the Iraq policy and forced assignments issue as the most important. Wrong. In reality, Iraq policy was not the major issue for respondents although, in fact, many disapproved. The top issues had primarily to do with problems of favoritism. Reporters, evidently, took too little time to read the three page AFSA survey including reviewing its graphs. Perhaps the reporting was so poor because most reporters failed to understand the Byzantine Foreign Service system. If that was the case, however, they could, and should, have asked.
Solvable inequities
From what I’ve discovered through my own research, albeit only the years 2006-8, the impressions recorded in the AFSA Survey were dead right on the perception of excessive favoritism. In fact, the survey results appear to have correctly identified two key issues that should demand the Department’s attention now, not later. Unlike the quagmire that is Iraq, these inequities can, and should, be easily resolved.
They are as follows:
1) Senior Foreign Service Officers as well as all other US government employees assigned overseas by other departments except the FBI are able to keep their Washington, DC locality pay boost when assigned abroad – a salary increase now over 20%. The Foreign Service generalists and specialists, however, cannot: this means they need to serve at 20% hardship (or greater) differential posts just to make up for what they lose leaving Washington to serve overseas. These are the very people who are paid less to begin with. There are far more of them. These professional staffers make US Embassies and Consulates abroad tick.
2) The second issue is the perception of abject favoritism in State’s assignments, promotions and special awards system. I reviewed the biographic information on the appointments of career U.S. Ambassadorial assignments for the years 2006-8. This information is readily available through the Internet. The data I used comes from the Ambassadorial biographies found on the State Department, White House and/or Senate Foreign Relations Committee websites. It didn’t take long to discover that what smelled like favoritism and walked like favoritism also talked like the favoritism highlighted in the AFSA survey.
Here’s what I found: too high a percentage of Senior Foreign Service Officers who held or hold positions in Human Resources were or are being nominated for Ambassadorial positions than should have been nominated if there had been a level playing field for Ambassadorial nominations among all those eligible to be considered for them. What is even more striking is that none of those nominated for Ambassadorships between 2006-8 from positions in Human Resources had served in Iraq since the invasion in 2003 – or for that matter had ever served in Iraq. Period.
I focused on the 2006-8 period because of the ever increasing pressure on Foreign Service Officers and specialists to serve in Iraq as the years have gone by since the invasion in 2003. It would, however, also be useful to know whether the trend for senior Human Resources staff to be assigned to Embassies without having served in Iraq extends back to 2003. Perhaps AFSA or the Congress should ask that question.
What is particularly troubling is that these are the same people who are encouraging, dangling enticements – or putting the screws on – their colleagues to serve in Iraq when 1) they have not done so themselves; and 2) they are then rewarded with Ambassadorial posts.
Yes, a number of Iraq Senior Foreign Service alumni did become Ambassadors after their service in the Iraq war zone – about 14 percent of the total career Ambassadorial assignments versus approximately 11 percent from Human Resources. But there were far more Senior Foreign Service Officers who served in Iraq during the same time frame than in Human Resources so there should have been a significantly greater number of Senior Foreign Service Officers who had served in Iraq awarded Ambassadorships than those in Human Resources. This was not the case. Perhaps the Department and/or AFSA should be asking why.
Maybe the stress and strain of a seemingly never ending Iraq commitment that calls for more and more Foreign Service personnel every year to serve in an ever expanding Embassy and on increasing PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Teams) and a career service and a Department that is severely understaffed are parts of the problem.
I also think, however, the current divisive system itself has far outlived whatever utility it may once have had. It does not, and has not for some time, served the requirements of the U.S. diplomatic service well. There needs to be top-to-bottom restructuring and rethinking of the Foreign Service personnel system for this 21st century global information age in which cultural understanding and foreign language expertise have never been more important. At minimum, playing by threadbare-teachers’ pet rules needs to stop.

'Magic is over' for the U.S., says foreign minister of France
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=11008549

By Alison Smale
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
PARIS: Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France and a longtime humanitarian, diplomatic and political activist on the international scene, says that whoever succeeds President George W. Bush may restore something of the United States' battered image and standing overseas, but that "the magic is over."

In a wide-ranging conversation with Roger Cohen of the International Herald Tribune at the launch of a Forum for New Diplomacy in Paris, Kouchner on Tuesday also held out the hope of talking with Hamas, the Palestinian faction that rules the Gaza Strip but has been ostracized by the West and by its Palestinian rival, Fatah, because it opposes peace talks with Israel and denies that Israel has a right to exist.

Asked whether the United States could repair the damage it has suffered to its reputation during the Bush presidency and especially since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Kouchner replied, "It will never be as it was before."

"I think the magic is over," he continued, in what amounted to a sober assessment from one of the strongest supporters in France of the United States.

U.S. military supremacy endures, Kouchner noted, and the new president "will decide what to do - there are many means to re-establish the image." But even that, he predicted, "will take time."

Kouchner began the 90-minute event with a speech that emphasized that "there is not just a new diplomacy; there is a new world."

To those intimidated by or fearful of what seem to be the rising challenges of globalization, climate change, spreading disease or new technology, Kouchner had a simple message: "The great difficulty is to accept this new world."

"There are not more problems - please, have a little memory - than 35 years ago," he said, recalling how, in 1971, he co-founded Médecins Sans Frontières in response to the horrors of the conflict in Nigeria over Biafra.

The challenges may be daunting, he said, noting for instance that the world had decided to act to curb the AIDS epidemic, but asking, "Can we take charge of all the other diseases? I'm not sure."

Some of the most persistent diplomatic challenges emanate from the Middle East, and Kouchner was asked about approaches to Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called for the destruction of Israel, or to Hamas, which has the same stated goal.

Kouchner and other European diplomats have tried to talk Iran out of its controversial nuclear program, but officially rejected all contacts with Hamas, which is listed as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union. Asked whether there is a way to engage Hamas, which is supported by a significant minority of Palestinians, Kouchner appeared to hold out hope of contact, saying: "I'm looking for a diplomatic way to say yes."

He then carefully couched this statement by noting that, in general, "we have to talk with our enemies," and that Fatah, which controls the West Bank, "always said they were in favor" of unity talks with Hamas. But after Hamas routed Fatah forces from Gaza in June, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, has refused to deal with Hamas, which he accused of committing a coup. Kouchner, of the Socialist left in France, stirred controversy when he accepted the offer from President Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the Gaullist center-right, to join his government last May.

At the end of the conversation, held in a glittering hall at the Académie Diplomatique Internationale, the IHT's partner in the new diplomatic forum, Kouchner denied that his activism had been curbed by the need to run the resplendent Foreign Ministry on the Quai d'Orsay and France's large diplomatic machinery around the world.

But he conceded that practicing the new diplomacy - which he defined as being action that is more practical, multifaceted and realistic than mere protocol calls and visits - "is very difficult, and very time-consuming."

From Times Online
March 12, 2008
Google could be superseded, says web inventor
The next generation of web technology is likely to be far more powerful than the current crop, Tim Berners-Lee said

Jonathan Richards
Google may eventually be displaced as the pre-eminent brand on the internet by a company that harnesses the power of next-generation web technology, the inventor of the World Wide Web has said.

The search giant had developed an extremely effective way of searching for pages on the internet, Tim Berners-Lee said, but that ability paled in comparison to what could be achieved on the "web of the future", which he said would allow any piece of information — such as a photo or a bank statement — to be linked to any other.

Mr Berners-Lee said that in the same way, the "current craze" for social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace would eventually be superseded by networks that connected all types of things — not just people — thanks to a ground-breaking technology known as the "semantic web".

The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web's development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data — not just a web page — so that it can "communicate" with other information.

Whereas the existing web is a collection of pages with links between them that Google and other search engines help the user to navigate, the "semantic web" will enable direct connectivity between much more low-level pieces of information — a written street address and a map, for instance — which in turn will give rise to new services.

"Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web," Mr Berners-Lee said. "Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.

"If you still weren't sure of where you were when you made a particular transaction, you could then drag your photo album on top of the calendar, and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park. So you wouldd know not to claim it as a tax deduction.

"It's about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life."

One example frequently given is of typing a street address which, if it had "semantic data" built into it, would link directly to a map showing its location, dispensing with the need to go to a site like Google `maps, type in the address, get the link and paste it into a document or e-mail.

The challenge, experts say, is in finding a way to represent all data so that when it is connected to the web, links to other relevant information can be recognised and established — a bit like the process known as "tagging". One expected application is in the pharmaceutical industry, where previously unconnected pieces of research into a drug or disease, say, could be brought together and assimilated.

Mr Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while a fellow at CERN, the European Organsation for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, would not be drawn on the type of application that the "Google of the future" would develop, but said it would likely be a type of "mega-mash-up", where information is taken from one place and made useful in another context using the web.

Existing "mash-ups", such as progams that plotted the location of every Starbucks in a city using Google maps, were a start, he said in an interview with Times Online, but they were limited because a separate application had to be built each time a new service was imagined.

"In the semantic web, it's like every piece of data is given a longitude and latitute on a map, and anyone can 'mash' them together and use them for different things."

Mr Berners-Lee, who is now a director of the Web Science Research Initiative, a collaborative project between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton, sought to put into context the rapid growth of social networking sites in recent years, saying that once the semantic web was rolled out they would be thought of as one of many types of network available.

"At the moment, people are very excited about all these connections being made between people — for obvious reasons, because people are important — but I think after a while people will realise that there are many other things you can connect to via the web."

He also spoke about what he described as one of the key challenges of the web today — confronting the security risks associated with large databases of information that were attractive to criminals and identity fraudsters.

"There are definitely better ways of managing that threat. I think we're soon going to see a new tipping point where different types of crimes become possible and lucrative, and it's something we constantly have to be aware of.

"One option is to build systems which more effectively track what information you've used to perform a particular task, and make sure people aren't using their authority to do things that they shouldn't be doing.