As someone who can barely remember what life was like before the internet, it was quite an experience attending yesterday a lecture given by the inventor of the web – Sir Tim Berners-Lee. A confusing, mind-boggling experience.

First, while no one I talked with after the event cared to admit, Berners-Lee talked way too fast. Add that to the fact that he was discussing the Semantic Web – the next phase of the web he is developing – and I was left swimming against a deadly current of jargon and ideas about onotologies and URIs.

Basically, the purpose of the Semantic Web is to make raw data available for anyone to use in a variety of applications. The data is classified and linked together by a standard set of onotologies (think tags). For further explanation, visit the World Wide Web Consortium, the organisation founded by Berners-Lee that has been developing the semantic web for the past eight years.

Berners-Lee said that he expects the life sciences industry, much like the high energy physicists with the world wide web, will go gang-busters for the Semantic Web because they will be able to share and cross-examine data. Cures for cancer and AIDS might be found that much quicker if researchers had access to each other’s information.

“The whole value-added of the web is serendipitous reuse,” said Berners-Lee.

But it’s not just for high-minded scientists. If the maps that Google or Yahoo use for their mapping applications were made available as pure data, they could be used in other ways that haven’t been thought of, or done, yet.

“I want to do Google Maps things to a ridiculous extent,” said Berners-Lee.

Many attendees said they were “inspired” by the lecture and “excited” about the concept of the Semantic Web.

“It was totally mind-blowing once I realised the implications of giving everything that we know exists in the physical world a URI,” said Ian Yorston, head of digital strategy at Radley College.

Yorston said that this would mean it would be quite easy to pull together small bits of data to make a larger application – such as a flight simulation through the Grand Canyon, using URIs for a plane, people and maps.

Other attendees expressed concern about the implications of having such a great volume of data accessible to anyone – such as privacy and identity theft.

But there were some who didn’t buy into the idea at all.

“I think we’re already looking at the future of the web,” said Miles Metcalf, an IT researcher at Ravensbourne College. Flickr and Delicious, where the entire community can create tags, are aimed at democratising information much more so than the Semantic Web, Metcalf said.

Ian Forrester, a software engineer for the BBC World Service, was sceptical of the way the semantic web would classify a very messy world with simple URIs.

Forrester brought up the example of “God”.

“What would God mean? Where would it link to?” he said.

I’m curious about this idea of a global community of scientists sharing data across state borders. The west certainly doesn’t want to share data on nuclear power with the rest of the world.

The event was held at the Oxford e-Horizons Institute, in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute, the Oxford e-Research Centre and the School of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southhampton.

A webcast of the lecture is expected to be posted on the Oxford Internet Institute website sometime soon.

William Sands has also blogged on this topic.

Check out Berners-Lee’s blog.