Thinking on the Web: Berners-Lee, Gödel and Turing

PREFACE

Tim Berners-Lee, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing are the pivotal pioneers who have opened the door to the Information Revolution. Through their contributions, we are witnessing the remarkable refashioning of the Information Age, which began with the introduction of the computer in the 1950s, into the Information Revolution as the World Wide Web evolves into a resource with intelligent features and capabilities.

The contributions of Gödel (What Is Decidable?), Turing (What Is Machine Intelligence?), and Berners-Lee (What Is Solvable on the Web?) are central to just how much “intelligence” can be projected onto the Web.

Web intelligence is an issue of philosophy as much as it is an issue of application. It has been suggested that the next generation of Web architecture, the Semantic Web, creates an Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework that will make Web content meaningful to computers, thereby unleashing a revolution of new abilities. More realistically, however, the Semantic Web may add semantics to the Web along with some limited AI capabilities to produce a more useful Web. Creating the Semantic Web with just the right balance between greater logic expressive power and achievable computer reasoning complexity is still being questioned and analyzed. An overly structured layering of many languages to deliver logic and machine-processing would probably overdesign the future Web architecture, leading to top-down command structure and weak adoption by the development community. ...